IBRARY  OF  THE  THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY 

PRINCETON.  N.  J. 


PRESENTED  BY 

the  Library  of 
he  IIe\7  Jerney   College   for  Women 

Division  -—..L-:. 

Section Jj_l 


BR    1700     .D683 

Douglas,  George  William, 

1850-1926. 
Essays  in  appreciation 


/^/ 


^ 


-^h^  /.  /^/-jf, 


ESSAYS   IN  APPRECIATION 


;i^ 


ESSAYS  # 


IN   APPRECIATION 


BY 

GEORGE  WILLIAM  DOUGLAS,   D.D.,   S.T.D. 

Canon  of  the  Cathedral  of  St.  John  the  Divine, 
New  York 


LONGMANS,   GREEN,  AND   CO. 

FOURTH  AVENUE  &  30TH  STREET,   NEW  YORK 

LONDON,  BOMBAY,  AND  CALCUTTA 

I9I2 


COPYRIGHT,   1912,  BY 
GEORGE    WILLIAM    DOUGLAS 


THE'PLIMP TON-PRESS 

(  W  •  n  •  O  ] 
NORWOOD-MASS'U'S'A 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

The  following  notice  of  the  Reverend 
Dr.  Henry  A.  Coit  was  originally  published 
in  a  letter  to  the  New  York  Evening  Post 
of  February  g,  1895;  that  of  Sister  Anne 
Ayres  was  pubhshed  in  a  sermon  preached 
on  the  fifty-fourth  anniversary  of  the 
Sisterhood  of  the  Holy  Communion,  Feast 
of  the  Purification,  February  2,  1900,  in 
the  Church  of  the  Holy  Communion,  New 
York,  at  the  unveihng  of  a  memorial  tab- 
let to  Sister  Anne.  The  notices  of  the 
Reverend  Dr.  Morgan  Dix  and  of  the 
Reverend  Dr.  William  R.  Huntington 
were  prepared  for  special  committees 
appointed  by  Bishop  Greer  in  behalf  of 
the  Diocese.  The  Minute  of  Bishop  Pot- 
ter was  written  for  a  special  committee 
appointed  by  the  Cathedral  Chapter. 
The  notice  of  the  Reverend  Canon  Lau- 
rence Henry  Schwab,  D.D.,  was  a  Min- 
ute prepared  for  a  special  committee  of 


vi  PREFATORY  NOTE 

the  New  York  Clerical  Club.  The  study 
of  Cardmal  Newman  was  published  in 
The  Churchman  of  May  and  June,  191 2. 

The  article  on  Bishop  Doane,  and  the 
review  of  the  Revision  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews  by  Two  Clerks,  appeared 
in  The  Churchman  of  August  17th,  1912. 
The  article  on  General  Booth  appeared 
in  The  Churchman  of  August  31st,  191 2. 

In  the  case  of  the  obituary  of  Dr.  Dix, 
of  Dr.  Huntington  and  of  Canon  Schwab, 
I  was  requested  to  write  the  testimonial 
in  behalf  of  my  colleagues  on  the  com- 
mittee, and  their  names,  with  mine,  were 
signed  to  the  same:  for  which  reason  their 
names  are  now  given  in  a  foot-note  to  each 
testimonial,  by  way  of  historical  record. 

Requests  from  various  quarters  have 
from  time  to  time  come  to  me  for  a 
republication  of  these  appreciations,  so 
that  I  am  induced  to  assemble  them  in  a 
less  fugitive  form  than  that  in  which  they 
originally  appeared.  G.  W.  D. 

Cathedral  of  St.  John  the  Divine, 
New  York,  September  2,  191 2. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The  Reverend  Henry  A.  Coit i 

Sister  Anne  Ayres ii 

The  Reverend  Morgan  Dix 31 

The  Reverenb  William  Reed  Huntington       .  55 

The  Right  Reverend  Henry  Codman  Potter  .  69 

The  Reverend  Canon  Laitrence  Henry  Schwab  87 

Newman  Once  More — A  Study 97 

Bishop  Doane — the  Poet 189 

An  Experiment   in   Conservative  Revision  of 

the  New  Testament  —  A  Review    ....  197 

General  Booth       217 


THE 
REVEREND   HENRY  A.  COIT,  D.D. 


THE 

REVEREND  HENRY  A.  COIT,  D.D. 

Rector  of  St.  Paul's  School,  Concord,  New 
Hampshire  ^ 

If  any  man  in  America  deserved  a  pub- 
lic funeral,  it  was  the  late  rector  of  St. 
Paul's  School.  And  yet  I  cannot  but 
feel  that  there  was  something  singularly 
appropriate  in  the  privacy  and  loneliness 
with  which,  from  sheer  stress  of  weather, 
so  far  as  friends  from  a  distance  were  con- 
cerned, his  remains  were  laid  to  rest.  The 
three  hundred  school-boys  on  the  spot 
must,  indeed,  with  their  teachers,  have 
formed  an  imposing  retinue  at  the  bur- 
ial; yet  these  were  but  a  part  of  the  vastly 
larger  number  that,  under  ordinary  cir- 

^  This  notice  of  Dr.  Coit's  funeral  was  originally  pub- 
lished in  a  letter  to  the  New  York  Evening  Post  of 
February  9,  1895. 


4  ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

cumstances,  would  have  thronged  about 
the  bier.  Very  many  of  us  older  boys 
found  it  to  be  simply  impossible  to  reach 
Concord  in  the  blinding,  drifting  bliz- 
zard that  prevailed  last  Friday,  block- 
ing all  roads  and  delaying  railway  trains. 
Nevertheless,  as  my  mind  goes  back 
to  the  old  days  when  I  was  a  school-boy 
there,  it  seems,  I  say,  quite  in  keeping 
with  the  character  of  our  dear  dead  master 
that  his  burial  should  be  thus  apart  and 
lonely,  hidden  by  the  snow.  For  was 
there  ever  a  great  man  who  more  instinc- 
tively shrunk  from  publicity  than  Dr. 
Coit?  Never,  from  start  to  finish,  was 
it  he  that  put  himself  forward;  it  was  his 
work  that  thrust  him  into  prominence. 
Never  once,  in  any  way,  did  he  adver- 
tise either  the  school  or  himself.  Nay,  he 
recoiled  from  everything  that  savored  of 
notoriety  with  the  simple  delicacy  of  a 


REV.  HENRY  A.   COIT,  D.D.  5 

girl.  He  hated  to  show  himself  in  strange 
places,  to  speak  or  write  in  them.  The 
only  place  where  he  was  thoroughly  him- 
self was  at  his  own  school,  among  his  own 
boys,  —  there  he  was  at  home.  It  was 
his  boys  and  under-masters,  as  far  and 
wide  they  scattered  to  their  homes,  that 
advertised  him;  as  St.  Paul  said  of  his 
disciples,  "Ye  are  my  epistle." 

There  is  hardly  time,  as  yet,  to  meas- 
ure Dr.  Coit's  position  among  our  great 
educators  and  administrators,  or  to  tell 
the  whole  story  of  his  distinguished  career. 
His  high  position  is  incontestable,  —  so 
great  that  we  can  only  appreciate  it  prop- 
erly after  the  lapse  of  years,  and  by  con- 
trast with  others  who  have  worked  in  the 
same  field.  Just  now,  in  the  shock  of 
his  unexpected  death,  his  old  boys  dwell 
naturally  upon  the  more  distinctively 
spiritual  aspects  of  his  character.     I  find 


6  ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

recurring  again  and  again  to  my  memory 
a  verse  of  the  Psalmist:  "They  shall  go 
from  strength  to  strength,  until  unto  the 
God  of  gods  appeareth  every  one  of  them 
in  Sion."  This  was  one  of  his  favorite 
texts.  As  my  mind  runs  back  to  the  little 
chapel,  —  the  first  one  of  the  earHest 
days,  —  I  recollect  how  that  text  used  to 
crop  out  again  and  again  in  his  sermons. 
I  did  not  care  much  for  sermons  in  those 
days,  but  somehow  there  was  hardly  ever 
a  Sunday,  if  "the  Doctor"  preached,  that 
some  sentence  of  his  did  not  fasten  on 
me.  Though  he  often  repeated  himself, 
the  connections  of  his  thought  were  so 
various  and  suggestive  that  I  did  not 
find  the  repetitions  tiresome;  and  I  well 
remember  how  surprised  and  interested 
I  used  to  be  when  Sunday  after  Sunday 
this  same  text  would  once  more  slip 
into  his  thoughts:    "They  shall  go  from 


REV.  HENRY  A.   COIT,  D.D.  7 

strength  to  strength."  This  was  the  very- 
thing  that  he  wanted  us  to  do:  it  was 
what  he  had  done  himself. 

Beginning  with  the  three  boys  in  the 
carriage  that  brought  him  to  Dr.  Shat- 
tuck's  country-house,  bit  by  bit,  he  had 
built  up  that  great  school,  and  had  built 
up  himself  with  it,  —  himself  the  stronger 
as  his  school  waxed  strong,  —  all  the 
poetry  and  the  sentiment  of  his  rarely 
gifted  nature  broadening  down  into  the 
fine  viriUty  of  the  tested  man.  We  used 
to  think  him  narrow  sometimes,  but  I 
am  not  sure  that,  as  we  ourselves  grow 
older,  we  are  not  coming  to  perceive  that 
what  we  then  esteemed  "narrowness" 
was  ultimate  truth  of  insight.  It  is  not 
given  to  many  men  to  be  thoroughly  reli- 
gious from  the  outset  to  the  end  of  their 
lives.  The  heart  of  most  men  roams  rest- 
lessly for  a  long  time  before  it  rests  at 


8  ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

last  in  God.  But  Dr.  Coit  was  religious 
always.  There  was  no  humbug  about  him. 
That  is  why  he  had  such  power  over 
us,  in  spite  of  ourselves.  From  classroom 
and  playground  to  the  Thursday  evening 
talks  and  the  daily  chapel,  that  is  the  sort 
of  a  man  he  was,  —  the  religious  man. 
Here,  in  very  truth,  was  a  man  who 
was  "alive  unto  God."  It  seemed  as  if 
he  never  opened  a  book  nor  touched  a 
topic,  nor  met  a  boy  or  man,  without  hav- 
ing "  God  in  all  his  thoughts."  And  some- 
how he  never  bored  us.  Other  men  bored 
us  boys  with  their  religiousness,  but 
"the  Doctor"  never  did.  Rather,  it  ap- 
peared as  if  he  had  merely  gotten  on  ahead 
of  us,  and  that  very  likely  we  should  try 
to  catch  up  with  him  by  and  by.  The 
pathos,  the  beauty,  the  risks,  the  awful- 
ness  and  the  joy,  the  prospects  and  the 
power  of  the  sincere  religious  life  of  the 


REV.   HENRY  A.   COIT,  D.D.  9 

human  soul,  —  they  have  been  reahzed 
in  our  Hfetime  by  this  man  whom  we  have 
known,  whom  we  have  called  our  mas- 
ter. It  rests  with  us  to  follow,  or  to  repu- 
diate, the  "secret  of  Jesus,"  for  which  he 
lived  and  died.  This,  I  think,  is  the  final 
impression  which  every  St.  Paul's  boy, 
whether  of  the  older  time  or  to-day,  has 
derived  from  intercourse  with  that  great 
schoolmaster  whose  earthly  remains  were 
laid  to  rest  last  Friday,  in  the  pure  New 
Hampshire  snows. 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  ^ 

On  this  Feast  of  the  Purification  of  the 
Blessed  Virgin  Mary,  in  the  year  of  our 
Lord  1900,  we  are  gathered  together  in 
this  Church  of  the  Holy  Communion  for  a 
special  purpose  known  to  us  beforehand. 
This  is  the  anniversary  of  the  Sisterhood 
of  the  Holy  Communion,  at  which  time  it 
has  been  the  custom  of  these  Sisters  to 
kneel  together,  as  such,  at  yonder  altar, 
and  partake  of  the  Body  and  Blood  of 
Jesus  Christ  our  Lord;  but  on  this  occasion 
we  are  invited  to  fix  our  thoughts  on  the 
life  and  work  of  one  particular  woman,  a 
tablet  to  whose  memory  is  here  unveiled 


1  This  notice  was  the  concluding  portion  of  the  sermon 
preached  on  the  fifty-fourth  anniversary  of  the  Sisterhood 
of  the  Holy  Communion,  Feast  of  the  Purification,  Febru- 
ary 2,  1900,  in  the  Church  of  the  Holy  Communion,  New 
York,  at  the  xmveiling  of  a  memorial  tablet  to  Sister  Anne 
Ayres. 


14  ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

to-day.  The  Sisterhood  of  the  Holy  Com- 
munion was  founded,  under  God,  by  Anne 
Ayres,  at  the  suggestion  of  WiUiam  Au- 
gustus Muhlenberg.  Like  all  things  of 
deep  spiritual  import,  neither  he  who, 
under  God,  made  the  suggestion,  nor  she 
in  whose  soul  the  suggestion  lodged,  per- 
ceived beforehand  what  the  outcome  of 
it  would  be.  According  to  our  Saviour's 
parable,  there  was  "first  the  blade,  then 
the  ear,  after  that  the  full  corn  in  the 
ear."  In  the  summer  of  1845,  there  was 
gathered  on  Sunday  in  the  little  chapel 
of  St.  Paul's  College,  a  small  congrega- 
tion, among  whom,  the  record  declares, 
were  Dr.  Muhlenberg's  sister,  his  niece, 
and  some  friends  who  were  spending  their 
vacation  at  College  Point,  Long  Island; 
and  when  to  these  Dr.  Muhlenberg 
preached  a  sermon  on  "Jephtha's  Vow," 
with  an  application  glancing  at  the  bless- 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  15 

edness  of  giving  one's  self  undividedly 
to  God's  service/  neither  he  nor  his  audi- 
ence guessed  that  his  covert  and  guarded 
suggestion  would  ultimately  bear  fruit  in 
the  Sisterhood  of  the  Holy  Communion; 
yet  Anne  Ayres,  who  was  one  of  that 
little  congregation,  lived  to  testify  that 
then  and  thereby  she  was  inspired  to  take 
the  successive  steps  which,  seven  years 
afterwards,  in  a  different  place  and  very 
different  circumstances,  resulted  in  the 
formation  of  the  Sisterhood  of  the  Holy 
Communion. 

I  do  not  propose  to  attempt  to-day  a 
biography  of  Sister  Anne  Ayres,  nor  to 
dwell  on  the  three  main  stages  of  her  work 
for  Christ  and  his  Church:  first,  in  this 
parish  of  the  Holy  Communion,  which 
gave  the  name  to  the  sisterhood  which 


'  See  "Life  and  Work  of  Dr.  Muhlenberg,"  by  Anne 
Ayres,  p.  189:  New  York,  Thomas  Whittaker. 


i6         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

she  founded;  second,  in  St.  Luke's  Hos- 
pital; and  last  of  all,  in  St.  Johnland.  I 
hardly  think  that  she,  from  her  place  in 
Paradise,  would  care  to  have  me  empha- 
size, before  God's  altar,  the  days  of  the 
years  of  her  earthly  pilgrimage,  nor  the 
temporal  and  temporary  aspects  of  her 
labor,  even  though  the  monuments  thereof 
be  as  notable  as  these.  Rather  she  would 
have  us  express  our  thoughts  of  her  this 
morning  in  the  words  of  the  familiar 
saint's  day  hymn: 

"From  all  Thy  saints  in  warfare,  for  all  Thy  saints  at 
rest, 

To  Thee,  O  blessed  Jesus,  all  praises  be  addressed. 

Thou,  Lord,  didst  win  the  battle,  that  they  might  con- 
querors be; 

Their  crowns  of  living  glory  are  lit  with  rays  from  Thee." 

And  so,  instead  of  dwelling  on  the  de- 
tails of  her  earthly  service  of  our  Master 
and  Saviour,  I  desire  to  bring  out,  if  I 
can,  the  salient  motive,  the  inner  spirit- 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  17 

ual  ideal  which  actuated  her,  and  which 
rendered  her  service,  in  a  sense,  peculiar. 
For  at  the  epoch  when  her  lifework  began, 
the  duty  which  she  undertook  was,  in  a 
true  sense,  peculiar,  so  far  at  least  as  our 
Anglican  Communion  was  concerned.  It 
was  laid  upon  Anne  Ayres  to  revive  in 
the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  of  the 
United  States  of  America  the  ancient 
Catholic  idea  of  woman's  undivided  ser- 
vice for  Christ  and  His  Church,  whether 
in  connection  with  the  administration  of 
divine  worship  in  God's  house,  or  of  works 
of  mercy,  or  of  Christian  education.  If 
you  will  read  her  biography  of  Dr.  Muhlen- 
berg with  close  attention  from  end  to  end, 
you  will  finally  perceive  what  the  under- 
lying idea  of  her  own  Hfe  was,  and  what 
were  the  range  and  the  atmosphere  in 
which  her  spirit  moved;  or  if  you  are  still 
in  some  doubt  about  it,  your  doubts  will 


i8  ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

be  dispelled  when  you  peruse,  in  the 
volume  entitled  "Evangelical  Catholic 
Papers,"  which  Anne  Ayres  also  edited, 
Dr.  Muhlenberg's  essay  on  "Protestant 
Sisterhoods." 

In  the  history  of  the  long,  large  life  of 
the  Church  Catholic  as  a  whole,  the  work 
of  women  specially  set  apart  for  Christ's 
service  has  assumed,  in  the  main,  one  or 
other  of  three  forms:  First  there  is  the 
work  of  the  deaconess  proper,  which  is, 
in  its  main  idea,  individual  and  single; 
even  as  that  of  each  of  the  three  orders 
of  the  Christian  ministry  proper,  bishops, 
priests,  and  deacons,  is,  in  its  main  idea, 
individual  and  single;  and  the  deaconess 
is  intended  to  be  the  workfellow  and 
assistant  of  some  particular  bishop,  or, 
under  the  bishop,  of  some  parish  priest 
or  rector.  Secondly,  there  is  the  cor- 
porate sisterhood,  whereby  a  number  of 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  19 

women,  each  of  whom  is  for  her  own  part 
consecrated  individually  to  work  for 
Christ  and  His  Church,  go  further  and 
band  themselves  together  in  an  Order, 
where  there  is  careful,  corporate  disci- 
pline, with  a  head  and  members,  and  a 
central  home,  and  a  visible  property,  and 
an  organized  rule  partaking  of  the  mili- 
tary. Here  the  connection  with  some 
parish  priest  or  rector,  and  the  obedience 
to  some  bishop,  is  less  complete  and  con- 
tinuous ;  the  idea  of  the  order  is  paramount, 
and  each  order  of  sisters  is  likely,  in  pro- 
cess of  time,  to  acquire  an  entity  and 
traditions  of  its  own.  Thirdly,  besides 
these  two  —  the  single  deaconess  on  the 
one  hand,  and  the  corporate  sisterhood 
on  the  other  —  the  vocation  of  women 
set  apart  to  Christian  work  in  the  Church 
has  taken  a  form  which  partakes  of  the 
characteristics  of  both  of  the  others  and 


20         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

is  intermediary  between  them.  Of  this 
third  type  of  the  service  of  women  in 
the  Church  the  Kaiserswerth  Deaconess 
Association,  as  estabHshed  by  the  Lu- 
theran Pastor  FHedner,  affords  the  best 
known  example;  although  lately  in  the 
Church  of  England,  associations  of  women 
have  arisen,  calling  themselves  some- 
times deaconesses,  sometimes  sisters, 
which  seem  to  be  successful  instances  of 
the  same  general  method.  In  this  third 
type,  while  the  idea  of  the  corporation  is 
kept  in  the  background,  subordinate  to 
that  of  the  deaconess  or  sister  as  an  indi- 
vidual servant  of  the  Church  for  Christ's 
sake,  nevertheless  there  is  a  recognized 
community,  to  which  the  individual  be- 
longs for  a  longer  or  shorter  period;  and 
this  community  life  entails  the  undoubted 
advantages  of  mutual  sympathy  and  sup- 
port, and  greater  unity  and  efficiency  in 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  21 

action;  the  various  individuals  with  vari- 
ous gifts  being  held  together  under  an 
acknowledged  leader  of  their  own  kind 
and  sex,  so  long  as  they  choose  to  remain 
together.  Each  of  these  three  main  forms 
of  woman's  work  in  the  Church  has  its 
evident  advantages,  and  each  also  its 
drawbacks  and  dangers.  And  underly- 
ing each  and  all  of  them  is  this  main  ques- 
tion to  be  settled:  whether  the  woman's 
dedication  to  her  work  shall  be  for  a  period 
of  time,  at  her  own  discretion,  or  for  life 
under  a  vow.  Among  Roman  Catholics 
some  of  the  strictest  conventual  orders 
take  vows  for  definite  periods,  renewable 
from  time  to  time;  and  even  where  the 
vow  is  meant  to  be  for  life,  it  is  neverthe- 
less in  the  power  of  the  Pope  or  bishop 
to  give  release.  And,  on  the  other  hand, 
in  the  case  of  the  Protestant  Deaconess 
Association  at  Kaiserswerth,  and  of  those 


2  2         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

associations  in  our  Anglican  Communion 
which  resemble  it,  although  the  vows  are 
in  form  renewable  from  time  to  time, 
nevertheless  the  spirit,  and  the  practical 
ideals  of  the  association,  as  now  devel- 
oped and  crystalUzed,  are  such  that  the 
individual  members,  even  though  they  be 
Lutherans,  distinctly  lose  caste,  and  are 
considered  by  their  associates  to  have 
fallen  from  their  true  profession,  if  they 
give  up  the  regular  deaconess  work  and 
marry,  or  go  back  into  the  secular  world. 
Now,  as  far  as  our  own  Anglican  Com- 
munion is  concerned,  no  one  who  is  famil- 
iar with  the  history  of  the  last  sixty 
years  can  fail  to  perceive  that  all  these 
three  types  of  women-workers  for  Christ 
and  His  Church  have  made  themselves  at 
home  among  us.  When  Sister  Anne 
Ayres  was  first  set  apart  by  Dr.  Muhlen- 
berg one  winter  evening  in  this  church 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  23 

where  we  are  now  gathered,  after  daily 
service  was  over  and  the  congregation 
dispersed,  and  only  the  priest  and  the 
postulant  were  left,  she  on  her  knees  before 
the  chancel  rail  and  he  in  his  surpHce 
within,  with  the  good  old  sexton  as  the 
only  witness,  waiting  to  put  out  the  lights 
—  when,  I  say,  Sister  Anne  Ayres  was 
thus  set  apart,  she  evidently  had  in  mind 
to  found  an  organized  body  of  sisters  not 
unlike  the  Kaiserswerth  deaconesses.  And 
such,  on  the  whole  and  in  a  general  way, 
was  the  character  of  the  association  which 
she  did  inaugurate,  and  which,  changing 
somewhat  with  the  changing  years,  exists 
to-day  under  the  name  of  the  Sisterhood 
of  the  Holy  Communion.  Ere  long,  three 
of  those  who  were  at  first  associated  thus, 
desiring  a  stricter,  closer,  and  more  for- 
mal organization,  left  the  Sisterhood  of 
the  Holy  Communion  and  founded  the 


24         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

Sisterhood  of  St.  Mary,  whose  noble  work 
has  likewise  been  widely  recognized  and 
blest  throughout  our  Church  in  this  coun- 
try and  beyond  it.  Meanwhile,  Sister 
Anne  Ayres  followed  Dr.  Muhlenberg  him- 
self first  to  St.  Luke's  Hospital  and  after- 
ward to  St.  Johnland;  and,  though  she 
still  worked  more  or  less  as  one  of  the 
Sisters  of  the  Holy  Communion,  never- 
theless, by  reason  of  her  practical  inde- 
pendence, she  in  effect  reverted  in  later 
years  to  what  New  Testament  scholars 
regard  as  probably  the  most  primitive 
of  all  the  types  of  woman's  formal  min- 
istry in  the  Christian  Church,  namely, 
the  single  deaconess,  like  Phoebe  com- 
mended of  St.  Paul.  Anne  Ayres  was 
not  called  by  this  name  of  deaconess,  for 
she  was  still  known  as  Sister  Anne,  and 
was  often  side  by  side  with  her  old  asso- 
ciates; nevertheless,  her  actual  work,  in 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  25 

its  comparative  separateness  and  single- 
ness, its  dependence  on  the  single  pastor 
alone,  and  in  other  regards  easily  distin- 
guishable —  her  actual  work  was  rather 
like  that  which  is  now  conducted  under 
our  recent  Canon  of  Deaconesses.  And 
in  this  Anne  Ayres  was  following  not 
merely  the  leading  of  circumstances,  but 
the  final  bent  of  Dr.  Muhlenberg's  mind, 
and  doubtless  of  her  own. 

Whatever  their  original  intention  may 
have  been  in  1845,  the  ultimate  feeling 
as  to  the  work  they  wished  to  prosecute 
is  clearly  expressed  in  Dr.  Muhlenberg's 
paper  on  "Protestant  Sisterhoods,"  which 
was  issued  in  1852: 

"When  the  Sisterhood  degenerates  it  will 
come  to  an  end.  It  depends  for  its  continu- 
ance wholly  upon  the  continuance  of  the 
zeal  which  called  it  into  being.  The  unit- 
ing principle  among  its  members  is   their 


26         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

common  affection  for  the  object  which  has 
brought  them  together;  but  there  is  no  con- 
straint from  without  on  the  part  of  the 
Church,  nor  any  from  within,  in  the  form  of 
rehgious  vows  or  promises  to  one  another, 
to  insure  their  freedom  of  conscience  as  indi- 
viduals. Not  that  they  hold  themselves 
ever  ready  to  adjourn.  Each  and  all  feel 
that  they  have  entered  upon  a  sacred  ser- 
vice, which  they  are  at  liberty  to  quit  only 
at  the  demand  of  duty  elsewhere.  Hand- 
maidens of  the  Lord,  waiting  upon  his  good 
pleasure,  they  are  not  anxious  for  the  future, 
content  to  leave  it  in  His  hands.  We  want 
no  combinations,  no  widespread  order  of 
charity,  under  one  head  or  Church  control, 
nor  in  any  way  capable  of  holding  property 
in  their  own  right." 

Such  was  Sister  Anne's  view  of  her 
vocation;  and  it  was  in  strict  keeping  with 
the  above  quoted  sentiments  that  when 
the  course  of  years,  duty,  as  she  believed, 
called  her  less  and  less  to  associate  work, 
and  more  and  more  to  individual  work, 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  27 

she  lived  more  as  a  single  worker.  Far 
be  it  from  you  or  me,  my  brethren,  to 
say  that  one  of  these  types  of  workers 
that  I  have  mentioned  is  better  or  more 
useful  than  the  others.  Human  nature 
has  many  sides,  and  opportunities  for 
Church  work  vary  in  their  aspects  and 
demands.  The  wind  of  God,  the  Holy 
Spirit  that  moves  individual  souls  to  this 
task  or  to  that,  bloweth  where  it  listeth; 
and  thou  hearest  the  sound  thereof,  but 
canst  not  tell  whence  it  cometh  or  whither 
it  goeth.  Our  Church  in  these  last  fifty 
years  has  found  a  place  and  function  for 
each  of  these  methods  of  work;  and  noble 
and  notable  results  have  been  accom- 
plished by  all  these  types  of  laborers  in 
the  vineyard.  Some  women  are  called 
of  God  to  one  of  these  vocations,  some  to 
another;  and,  under  certain  safeguards 
which    history    and    experience    suggest, 


28         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

all  of  these  ministries  are  likely  to  be 
wanted  in  the  future,  as  they  have  been 
in  the  past.  Each  type  has  its  strong 
points  and  its  weak  points,  its  peculiar 
disabilities  and  limitations,  and  each  its 
own  reward  —  the  "name  that  no  man 
knoweth,  save  he  that  receive th  it." 

But  my  duty  to-day  is  a  simple  one: 
to  single  out  and  emphasize  the  partic- 
ular type  of  character  and  of  task  which 
belonged  to  this  woman  whose  noble 
name  we  distinguish  for  commemoration, 
and  the  tablet  to  whose  memory  we 
to-day  unveil.  And  what  I  desire  to  say 
in  conclusion  is  this:  I  chose  my  text 
because  it  suggested,  as  I  believe,  the 
key-note  of  the  character  of  Sister  Anne 
Ayres.  Just  in  proportion  as  our  work 
for  Christ  is  a  separate  and  single  work, 
not  supported  by  definite  and  indissoluble 
ties  to  some  large  organization,  just  in 


SISTER  ANNE  AYRES  29 

that  proportion,  if  we  are  to  succeed  and 
to  persevere,  do  we  need  to  realize  what 
our  text  expresses  —  the  absolute  near- 
ness of  God  to  the  soul,  and  the  absolute 
dependence  of  each  single  soul  on  God. 
"All  Uve  unto  Him."  "My  soul  hangeth 
on  Thee."  Here  is  where  the  really  de- 
vout Romanist  and  the  really  devout 
Protestant  meet  on  common  ground  — 
John  Bunyan,  and  John  Wesley,  and  John 
Keble,  with  Xavier  and  Loyola  and  Fran- 
cois de  Sales  and  Fenelon.  You  may 
criticise  these  men,  for  they  were  human; 
you  may  differ  from  them,  for  they  were 
fallible;  but  you  cannot  deny  that,  one 
and  all,  they  were  permeated  through  and 
through  by  the  consciousness  of  God  our 
Father ;  that  day  by  day  and  hour  by  hour 
they  "looked  to  Him."  And  such,  too, 
was  Anne  A3n:es.  This  it  was  which 
enabled  her  to  be  true  to  her  vocation  up 


30         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

to  the  very  end  without  resting  on  those 
outward  helps  of  association  and  daily 
rule  which  most  of  us  require  to  keep  us 
straight  and  true.  It  seemed  as  if  she 
never  met  a  human  being,  without  first 
saying  secretly  to  herself  that  ejacula- 
tion of  the  saint:  "In  whatsoever  way 
Thou  wiliest,  bind  me  faster  to  Thee." 
In  her  was  manifested  the  power  of  the 
personal  recollection  of  God  to  reinforce 
and  fructify  the  other  powers  of  mankind ; 
and  there  lay  the  secret  of  her  pervasive 
influence  over  her  fellows.  Other  people 
might  tell  them,  but  she  first  made  them 
feel  that  for  each  and  all  of  us  there  is 
but  one  life  to  live,  and  that  directly  with 
God.  "As  the  eyes  of  a  maiden  unto  the 
hand  of  her  mistress,  so  her  eyes  looked 
unto  the  Lord  her  God." 


THE    REVEREND    MORGAN    DIX 


THE    REVEREND    MORGAN    DIX 

On  Saturday,  May  2,  a.d.  1908,  at  a 
meeting  of  the  Clergy  who  were  present 
at  the  funeral  of  the  Rev'd  Morgan 
Dix,  S.T.D.,  LL.D.,  D.C.L.,  late  Rector 
of  Trinity  Church,  New  York,  the  un- 
dersigned were  appointed  by  the  Rt. 
Rev'd  David  H.  Greer,  D.D.,  Bishop 
Coadjutor  of  the  Diocese,  as  a  Com- 
mittee to  draft  resolutions  or  a  Minute, 
expressive  of  the  feelings  of  those  pres- 
ent and  of  those  unavoidably  absent,  in 
view  of  our  recent  bereavement.^  What 
we  say  can  but  imperfectly  convey  an 
idea  of  the  depth  of  the  impression  made 


^  The  names  of  the  Committee  were: 

William  T.  Manning, 
William  R.  Hxtntington, 
J.  Lewis  Parks, 
George  William  Douglas, 
William  M.  Grosvenor. 


34         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

by  the  sudden  departure  of  this  distin- 
guished man,  who  was  also  to  many  of 
us  brother,  pastor,  and  friend.  Events 
of  this  importance  call  forth  more  than 
the  grief  naturally  caused  by  the  visit  of 
death  to  the  house:  they  shock  men  by 
the  consciousness  that  a  treasure  jointly 
owned  by  large  numbers  has  been  taken 
from  their  hands,  and  that  a  force  potent 
for  good  throughout  the  community  has 
been  withdrawn  to  a  higher  sphere.  He 
whom  we  have  lost  may  be  said  to  have 
belonged  to  the  whole  Church,  and  to  the 
people  at  large;  he  was  a  link  whereby 
men  of  divers  names  and  vocations  and 
origin  were  united,  in  one  way  or  another, 
in  the  great  household  of  God  which  is 
larger  than  any  parish,  or  city,  or  diocese, 
and  even  than  any  nation. 

We  think  of  him  first  as  a  representa- 
tive of  the  Diocese  of  New  York  in  the 


REVEREND   MORGAN  DIX  35 

General  Convention  of  our  American 
Church,  where  for  years  he  presided  in 
the  House  of  Deputies  with  rare  dignity, 
courtesy,  and  justice;  and  with  that  char- 
acteristic intellectual  poise  and  spiritual 
detachment  which  commanded  the  con- 
fidence and  regard  of  his  associates.  Al- 
though in  matters  ecclesiastical  he  was  a 
man  of  strong  personal  con\dctions  evi- 
dent to  all,  no  one  could  accuse  him  of 
unfair  partisanship  in  the  presidential 
chair,  and  political  wire-pulling  was  to 
him  impossible.  Even  when  gainsaying 
an  antagonist,  his  opposition  did  not  leave 
a  sting,  —  so  much  so,  that  in  his  later 
years  many  of  his  theological  opponents, 
in  our  Communion  and  in  other  Commun- 
ions, struck  hands  with  him  in  a  feeling 
of  true  fellowship,  having  learned  from 
him  a  lesson  of  agreem^ent  in  contro- 
versy, and  of  tolerant  devotion  to  the  com- 


36         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

mon  cause  which  it  is  never  too  late  to 
learn.  As  a  debater  in  the  Convention 
his  speech  was  always  weighty;  for  his 
thought  was  clear  and  his  words  were 
few,  though  charged,  when  necessary, 
with  a  fire  that  was  none  the  less  effec- 
tive because  it  was  kept  down.  And 
these  same  traits  had  long  previously 
manifested  themselves  in  the  councils 
and  committees  of  the  Diocese  of  New 
York,  and  in  all  the  various  organiza- 
tions, educational,  civic,  and  eleemosy- 
nary, of  which  he  was  a  member.  To 
many  of  these  as  Rector  of  Trinity  Church 
he  belonged  ex  officio;  but  he  brought  to 
them  not  merely  the  prestige  of  his  great 
position,  but  the  influence  of  his  high 
personal  character,  of  his  regularity  and 
faithfulness. 

We  think  of  him  next  as  Rector  of  the 
mother  church  of   New  York,  the   most 


REVEREND   MORGAN  DIX  37 

important  parish  in  this  country,  whose 
wealth,  inherited  from  earlier  days  and  a 
different  national  regime,  has  rendered 
the  corporation  of  "The  Rector,  War- 
dens, and  Vestrymen  of  Trinity  Church, 
New  York,"  the  most  potent  parochial 
organization,  for  good  or  evil,  in  the  world. 
When  Morgan  Dix  became  its  Rector  two 
generations  ago,  although  this  parish  was 
even  then  relatively  a  power  in  the  land, 
it  was,  from  the  standpoint  of  our  time, 
"the  day  of  small  things."  Dr.  Dix 
came  to  it  in  the  truest  sense  a  citizen  to 
the  manner  born;  representing  the  best 
results  so  far  of  the  social,  academic,  and 
professional  culture  of  this  community. 
With  the  exception  of  less  than  three 
years,  he  had  lived  his  life  and  done  his 
work  as  a  school-boy,  as  a  collegian,  as 
a  seminarian,  and  as  an  ecclesiastic,  in 
the  city  of  New  York;  whereas  among  his 


38         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

most  noted  contemporaries  few  were  city 
born.  It  is  proverbial  that  the  sons  of 
rich  men  and  of  great  men  seldom  enhance 
the  station  which  they  inherit;  but  Dr. 
Dix  added  ten  talents  to  his  inherited  ten, 
and  that  in  full  view  of  the  community 
which  held  in  recollection  his  father's 
record  of  civic  and  personal  distinction. 
In  the  words  of  the  Psalmist,  "  God  heard 
his  vows,  and  gave  him  the  heritage  of 
those  that  fear  God's  name."  The  faith 
which  dwelt  first  in  his  father  and  his 
mother  was  in  him  also,  —  a  blessed  pre- 
destination to  the  life  of  faith,  to  which 
he  was  not  disobedient  in  the  patient, 
laborious  years  of  a  long  career.  To  the 
end  his  early  home  explained  him;  yet  he 
outgrew  it  as  a  strong  man  should,  grow- 
ing from  strength  to  strength;  although 
the  sweet  memories  of  it,  and  the  sense 
of   the   everlasting   value   of    the   home, 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  39 

clung  to  him.  As  a  boy  he  knew  the  joys 
of  social  refinement  and  ample  means, 
the  wit  and  wisdom  of  the  intellectual  Hfe 
fraught  with  historic  associations.  He 
had  behind  him  a  strong  mother  and  a 
patriotic  father  who,  between  them,  cre- 
ated an  atmosphere  for  their  son,  wherein 
the  quality  of  the  scholar  and  the  artist 
blended  with  something  of  the  soldier 
who  feared  God  but  not  man,  and  under- 
stood that  duty  is  stern.  His  father  was 
a  public  man,  and  it  was  an  industrious 
home,  with  the  same  habits  of  quiet  punc- 
tuality which  were  afterward  to  character- 
ize the  Rector  of  Trinity  Parish  throughout 
his  life.  Fond  of  frolic  with  his  inti- 
mates, and  possessed  of  abounding  humor 
to  oil  the  wheels  of  labor,  young  Dix 
seemed  nevertheless  from  the  start  to  be 
enlisted  Uke  a  soldier  to  accept  as  a  matter 
of  course  the  tasks  of  a  vast  routine.    For 


40         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

little  things  and  great  things  he  was  alike 
conscientiously  responsible,  and  wonderful 
for  equanimity  and  quiet  nerves. 

Upon  the  Christian  Ministry  he  entered 
with  evident  awe,  and  a  certain  conse- 
quent severity  is  visible  in  the  portrait 
of  him  by  Huntington,  painted  after  the 
full  rectorship  of  Trinity  Parish  had  been 
laid  upon  his  shoulders.  From  that  day 
forward  his  influence  radiated  from  the 
posts  whence  the  true  priest's  influence 
always  radiates:  the  altar  and  the  pulpit. 
Whatever  Morgan  Dix  was  elsewhere 
began  from  what  he  was  in  the  pulpit 
and  at  the  altar.  No  breath  of  scandal- 
ous suspicion,  no  attribution  of  wrong 
motives  ever  tarnished  his  name.  He 
bore  the  message,  and  he  had  the  mind  of 
Christ.  Over  in  England,  in  those  days 
—  the  days  that  followed  the  Tractarian 
Movement  —  it  was  said  of  Oxford  that 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  41 

the  most  remarkable  thing  about  it  was 
not  the  architecture  and  traditions,  but 
the  nimiber  of  men  you  met  in  the  streets 
and  quadrangles  whom  you  knew  to  be 
unworldly,  "setting  their  affections  on 
things  above,  not  on  things  on  the  earth"; 
and  such  was  the  inevitable  impression 
that  Dr.  Dix  made  on  all  who  knew  him. 
A  lady  who  at  that  period  met  him, 
unobserved,  as  he  was  walking  his  accus- 
tomed way  to  his  office  of  a  weekday, 
said  of  him,  "Ah,  you  can  see  in  his 
face  that  he  is  determined  to  keep  the 
devil  down."  He  had  a  profound  sense 
of  the  supernatural.  And  to  this  was 
added  the  inimitable  impression  of  intel- 
lectual and  moral  certainty,  of  rehgious 
conviction.  "He  knew  Whom  he  had 
beUeved."  While  many  of  his  contempo- 
raries were  shifting  their  theological  posi- 
tions from  time  to  time  under  the  stress 


42         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

of  new  influences,  early  in  his  ministry 
he  took  his  position  promptly,  and  kept 
it  thereafter  on  the  whole.  Standing  on 
what  he  felt  was  a  theological  terra  firma^ 
he  did  his  best  work  and  dealt  his  best 
blows  at  an  age  when  most  clergymen 
are  beating  the  air;  and  always  his  pre- 
dominating zeal  was  for  the  glory  of  God 
and  the  salvation  of  souls.  His  real 
work  in  those  days  was  his  cure  of 
souls,  in  which  he  developed  an  intense 
spiritual  energy;  and,  besides  this,  to 
vindicate  for  our  American  Church  her 
title-deeds  as  a  child  of  the  mother 
Church  of  England,  and  thereby  her 
title  to  the  inheritance,  the  spirit,  and 
the  aims  and  obligations  of  the  Church 
CathoHc  and  Apostolic,  wherein  we  affirm 
our  beHef  in  the  Creeds.  To  Dr.  Dix's 
mind  the  Via  Media  of  the  Oxford  Trac- 
tarians  was  not  a  theory,  but  a  fact,  pre- 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  43 

served  in  our  Prayer  Book  and  realized 
among  us.  He  was  sure  that  the  An- 
glican Church  went  into  the  crucible  of 
the  Reformation  as  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land, and  came  out  of  it  as  the  Church 
of  England,  and  planted  afterward  in 
America  this  Church  of  ours  as  a  true 
daughter  of  the  ancient  stock.  There- 
fore when  he  spoke  of  the  Catholic 
Church  and  churchmen  of  earher  ages  — 
of  a  Leo,  or  a  Gregory,  or  an  Augustine, 
or  a  Chrysostom  —  it  was  as  of  his  own 
forbears  in  the  ministry  of  Christ  to 
men.  His  mind  was  attuned  to  Holy 
Scripture  as  expounded  by  the  early 
Fathers,  and  their  prayers  and  the  early 
Liturgies  fell  naturally  from  his  lips,  — 
so  naturally,  that  there  was  no  book  of 
private  devotions  which  he  preferred  to 
Bishop  Andrewes's  in  the  original  Greek 
and  Latin,  where  the  expressions  of  the 


44         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

Scriptures  and  the  Fathers  and  the 
Liturgies  are  fused  in  one.  Withal  he 
had  an  innate  sense  of  law.  He  never 
practised  any  ritual  which  he  did  not 
believe  to  be  lawful  in  this  land  and 
Church  of  ours,  and  his  supreme  care  was 
for  the  beauty  of  holiness.  No  one  could 
doubt  that  who  ever  heard  him  pray.  By 
the  bedside  of  the  sick  he  might  at  first 
sight  be  esteemed  somewhat  cold  and 
reserved,  a  trifle  constrained  in  manner; 
but  when  he  fell  upon  his  knees  all  that 
passed  away,  and  there  came  into  his 
voice  in  prayer  a  beseeching,  penetrating 
tone  which,  once  heard,  could  never  be 
forgotten.  Then  you  knew  that  Dr.  Dix 
watched  for  souls,  as  they  that  must  give 
account.  And,  unlike  many  clergymen,  he 
was  able  to  carry  this  same  beseeching, 
penetrating  tone  into  his  rendering  of  the 
public  prayers,  so  that  his  intoning  of  the 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  45 

Church  Service  was  a  model  in  its  easy 
naturahiess  and  sweetness.  He  did  not 
"sing,"  he  "said"  the  prayers,  in  the  true 
sense  of  the  old  Prayer  Book  rubric.  And 
the  rare  recollection  of  mind  and  concen- 
tration of  spirit  with  which  he  celebrated 
Holy  Communion  made  one  feel  as  if 
so  it  must  have  been  said  in  the  Cata- 
combs by  the  martyrs,  ere  they  went  forth 
to  the  Uons.  When  he  entered  the  pul- 
pit there  was  something  of  the  same. 
Bishop  Hobart  in  the  pulpit  of  Trinity 
Church  had  rendered  the  former  style  of 
conventional  eloquence  impossible;  and 
when  Dr.  Dix  followed  him,  after  an  inter- 
val, through  all  the  pulpits  of  the  parish 
the  knell  of  the  old  embroidered  sermon 
was  sounded.  Alike  in  the  chapels  and 
the  mother  church  the  effect  was  notice- 
able on  all  his  assistants  of  the  terse, 
incisive  beauty  of  the  Rector's  style  and 


46         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

his  English  undefiled.  No  man  in  Amer- 
ica could  make  words  serve  him  with  finer 
skill  than  Morgan  Dix,  and  to  those  who 
knew  the  English  tongue  and  literature 
his  sentences  were  packed  with  subtle 
allusions  and  references  that  were  a  con- 
stant charm  even  on  the  printed  page; 
but  when  he  spoke  from  the  pulpit  there 
was,  when  he  was  at  his  best,  the  added 
power  of  a  voice  that  could  be  resonant 
and  sharp  with  reprobation,  or  full  of 
melody  and  tenderest  appeal.  Withal  he 
possessed  the  power  of  the  true  judge's 
charge  to  the  jury;  his  statement  of  the 
case  was  the  best  of  arguments. 

It  is  impossible  in  this  Minute  to  tell 
the  story  of  his  multiform  activities,  or 
even  to  allude  to  all  of  them,  or  to  the 
books  he  published.  We  have  dwelt 
rather  on  his  more  personal  traits  of  char- 
acter, for  another  generation  will  know 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  47 

nothing  of  these;  but  we  have  known 
them,  and  now  we  feel  their  loss.  Men- 
tion must  at  least  be  made  of  his  work  in 
promoting  the  organization  of  the  Sisters 
of  St.  Mary,  whose  director  he  was  for 
years,  and  for  whom  he  composed  the 
Book  of  Hours,  which  of  its  kind  is  a  land- 
mark in  this  country,  and  indicates  the 
range  and  accuracy  of  Dr.  Dix's  Hturgical 
knowledge  and  taste.  Dr.  Muhlenberg 
had  led  the  way,  and  had  developed  the 
idea  of  Sisterhoods  up  to  a  certain  point; 
but  it  was  chiefly  Dr.  Dix,  with  the  sanc- 
tion of  Bishop  Horatio  Potter  and  the 
weight  of  Trinity  Church,  who  really 
secured  for  Sisters,  in  the  conventual 
sense  of  the  term,  a  place  and  a  hearing  in 
our  American  Church.  For  scholarship 
proper  he  had  little  time,  though  the 
disposition  and  tools  of  the  scholar  were 
amply  his;  and  in  his  earlier  ministry  his 


48         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

published  commentaries  on  St.  Paul's 
Epistles  to  the  Romans,  Galatians,  and 
Colossians  gave  testimony  to  his  bent. 
He  was  often  in  those  days  the  object  of 
scurrilous  abuse,  and  was  accused  of 
Romanizing;  whereas  in  fact  he  gave  to 
Tractarianism  a  steady  base  in  America, 
and  proved  once  more  the  truth  of  the 
observation  that  few  who  studied  the 
Scriptures  deeply  have  gone  over  from 
our  Communion  to  the  Church  of  Rome. 
For  the  improvement  of  Church  Music, 
and  the  progress  among  us  of  the  Choral 
Service,  he  did  more  than  wiU  ever  be 
known;  for  into  this,  in  his  unobtrusive 
way,  he  threw  the  whole  influence  and  the 
resources  of  his  parish;  and  somehow 
many  clergymen  and  laymen,  who  would 
not  have  liked  such  music  or  such  methods 
for  themselves,  seemed  to  feel  that  it  was 
well  and  proper  for  Trinity  Parish  to  show 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  49 

what  might  be  done  in  that  Hne  if  anybody 
had  the  means  and  a  mind  to. 

When  he  came  to  his  parish  in  1862, 
besides  Trinity  Church  there  were  only 
St.  Paul's  and  St.  John's  and  Trinity 
Chapel;  with  their  Churchyards  which, 
when  there  was  a  move  to  sell  them  as 
valuable  real  estate,  his  ardent  sense  of 
the  Christian's  duty  to  the  dead  enabled 
him  to  have  preserved  as  silent  witnesses, 
amidst  this  world's  business,  to  our  faith 
in  the  life  of  the  world  to  come.  But  al- 
though Dr.  Dix's  administration  was  thus 
conservative,  he  was  keen  to  perceive  that 
the  main  task  of  a  rich  church  should  be 
among  the  poor.  Not  only  did  he,  as 
Assistant  Rector,  reside  in  a  house  in 
Hubert  Street  among  the  poor;  not  only 
did  he,  as  Rector,  insist  for  many  years 
on  living  in  the  old  Varick  Street  Rectory 
long  after  that  neighborhood  had  been 


50         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

deserted  by  the  fashionable;  not  only  did 
he  find  his  greatest  happiness  in  his  day- 
school  and  Sunday-school  and  house-to- 
house  visiting  among  the  poor;  but  during 
his  rectorship  it  began  to  be  his  vestry's 
policy  to  establish  new  mission  chapels, 
besides  Trinity  Chapel  and  St.  Agnes' 
which  ministered  rather  to  the  well-to-do. 
Hence  arose  St.  Chrysostom's  and  St. 
Augustine's  Chapels;  and  St.  Cornelius' 
for  the  soldiers  on  Governor's  Island; 
while  All  Saints',  Henry  Street,  and  St. 
Luke's,  Hudson  Street,  and  finally  the 
Church  of  the  Intercession  far  uptown, 
were  one  by  one  taken  under  Trinity's 
fostering  care.  Meanwhile  the  chancel 
of  Trinity  Church  was  enlarged  and  beau- 
tified by  the  Astor-memorial  reredos; 
St  Paul's  and  St.  John's  Chapels  were 
renovated  and  embellished;  and  the  old 
Rectory  in  Varick  Street  was  transformed 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  51 

into  a  Hospital,  as  the  condition  on  which 
the  Rector  would  consent  to  move  up- 
town to  the  new  Rectory  adjacent  to 
Trinity  Chapel.  Dr.  Dix's  personal  gifts 
to  charitable  objects  were  unstinted,  but 
little  published:  his  own  left  hand  hardly 
knew  what  his  right  hand  did.  Further- 
more, in  the  progress  of  the  years,  much 
of  what  is  now  known  as  the  Settlement 
idea  of  parish  work  was  anticipated  in 
Trinity  Mission  House  and  the  oper- 
ations of  the  Trinity  Church  Association. 
These  works  do  follow  him.  Now  that 
he  has  been  withdrawn  from  us,  by 
these  his  monuments  shall  we  renew  our 
memories  of  him  with  respect  and  admi- 
ration and  the  tender  regard  that  belong 
to  one  who  was  faithful  in  the  oppor- 
tunities of  a  manifold  career,  calm  under 
frequent  misunderstandings  and  misrep- 
resentations, courageous  in  adversity,  and 


52         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

most  beloved  by  those  who  knew  him 
best. 

The  home  circle  is  sacred:  we  may  not 
there  intrude.  But  it  is  a  matter  of  com- 
mon knowledge  that  all  children  took  to 
him  instinctively,  and  he  loved  their  ways, 
full  of  the  spirit  of  Alice  in  Wonderland. 
By  his  talents  for  drawing  with  pen  and 
pencil,  and  of  musical  improvisation,  he 
was  able  to  engage  the  fancy  of  all  child- 
like spirits,  young  or  old.  With  his  wife 
and  children  we  sympathize  in  their  sor- 
row, praying  that  both  they  and  we, 
with  him  who  has  gone  before  to  Para- 
dise, may  be  found  at  last  in  Christ,  heirs 
together  of  the  grace  of  life. 

Brethren,  the  time  is  short.  The  hues 
which  Copernicus  traced  for  his  own 
tombstone  were  a  favorite  prayer  of 
Dr.  Dix's,  and  they  furnish  for  ourselves 
a  fitting  close  to  this  insufficient  sketch 


REVEREND  MORGAN  DIX  53 

of  the  great  and  noble  soul,  our  brother 
in  the  Ministry,  who  has  gone  to  his  last 
account : 

Non  parem  Pauli  gratiam  require, 
Veniam  Petri  neque  posco,  sed  quam 
In  Crucis  ligno  dederas  latroni 
Sedulus  oro. 


THE    REVEREND    WILLIAM    REED 
HUNTINGTON,  D.D.,   D.C.L.,  L.H.D. 


THE   REVEREND   WILLIAM   REED 
HUNTINGTON,  D.D.,  D.C.L.,  L.H.D.^ 

The  undersigned,^  a  Committee  ap- 
pointed by  the  Bishop  of  New  York  to 
draft  a  Minute  on  the  death  of  the 
Rev.  Wilham  Reed  Huntington,  D.D., 
D.C.L.,  L.H.D.,  late  rector  of  Grace 
Church,  New  York,  cannot  find  words 
to  express  the  thoughts  and  feelings 
which  crowd  for  utterance.  To  his 
mourning  family  we  offer  our  heartfelt 
sympathy;  and  there  is  a  general  sense 
of  emptiness,  not  only  in  the  diocese  of 
New  York,  but  in  our  whole  American 

^  Obituary  Minute  adopted  by  the  Committee  of 
Clergymen  appointed  by  the  Bishop  of  New  York.  The 
names  of  the  Committee  were: 

George  William  Douglas, 

William  T.  Maiwing, 

J.  Lewis  Parks, 

Ernest  M.  Stires, 

CoRNEUus  B.  Smith. 


58         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

Church,  now  that  this  great  man  is 
gone.  For  his  was  a  personality  singu- 
larly exuberant  in  natural  gifts  of  intel- 
lect and  spirit;  moreover,  the  grace  of 
God  abounded  in  him.  He  was  great 
as  a  seer  and  prophet;  as  an  organizer 
and  administrator;  as  an  ecclesiastical 
statesman;  as  a  master  of  the  EngUsh 
tongue,  thinking  incisively  and  speaking 
winged  words,  most  powerful  in  parlia- 
mentary debate;  as  a  pastor  of  troubled 
souls;  as  a  friend  of  his  fellows,  faithful 
to  the  uttermost.  He  never  shirked  a 
burden  which  belonged  to  him,  and  he 
shared  unselfishly  the  burdens  of  many 
others.  His  long  career  was  marked  by 
rare  consistency:  one  always  knew  where 
to  find  him.  Keenly  alive  to  the  weak- 
nesses of  men  and  the  e\ils  of  the  day,  he 
was  nevertheless  no  pessimist;  rather  he 
was  persistently  hopeful  of  men  and  things, 


WILLIAM  REED  HUNTINGTON      59 

and  at  three-score  and  ten  he  was  still 
ready  for  vast  enterprises,  manifesting  in 
manifold  activities  his  unique  resource- 
fulness. 

In  social  intercourse  his  humor  and  alert 
intellectuality  were  sweetened  by  the 
gentleness  of  spirit  which  was  never 
quite  hidden  beneath  his  mantle  of  nat- 
ural reserve.  He  did  not  ask  for  sym- 
pathy, but  was  quick  to  extend  it  to  all 
who  opened  to  him  a  truly  troubled 
heart.  Sincere  himself  to  the  very  core, 
he  elicited  sincerity  from  every  one  with 
whom  he  had  to  do;  and  many  who  had 
felt  in  him  something  of  the  shrewd 
Puritan,  bred  in  the  nipping  and  the  eager 
air  of  Eastern  Massachusetts,  found  in 
Dr.  Huntington,  when  sorrow  fell  upon 
them,  a  pastor  of  souls  whose  touch  was 
Uke  an  angel  of  mercy. 

He  would  not  wish  us  to  dwell  here  on 


6o         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

the  achievements  of  his  Hfe,  so  uncom- 
monly successful,  so  thorough  in  its  serv- 
ice. But  at  least  mention  must  be  made 
of  his  work  in  the  General  Convention  for 
the  enrichment  of  the  Prayer  Book,  and 
for  its  more  flexible  use;  of  his  Hfelong 
zeal  for  Church  unity;  of  his  splendid 
part  in  the  upbuilding  of  the  New  York 
cathedral;  and  of  the  exhibition,  in  and 
through  his  great  parish,  of  what  the  "In- 
stitutional Church"  might  be  when  the 
proper  man  and  the  proper  circumstances 
meet,  and  there  is  the  strength  of  will 
not  to  let  worship  be  overborne  by  clubs 
and  classes. 

It  was  a  characteristic  act  of  his  when, 
at  the  period  of  life  fixed  in  his  mind 
beforehand,  he  tendered  his  resignation 
as  rector  of  Grace  Church.  In  his  own 
lion-heart  he  did  not  feel  superannuated; 
but  if  his  Vestry  thought  that  his  day  was 


WILLIAM  REED  HUNTINGTON      6i 

done,  he  was  willing  to  retire.  And  when 
they  signified  their  unwillingness  to  let 
him  go,  with  the  gladsome  energy  of  inte- 
rior conviction  he  buckled  on  his  harness 
once  again.  Equally  characteristic  was  his 
use  of  the  fund  which,  at  this  juncture, 
was  raised  for  him  as  a  personal  testi- 
monial from  admiring  parishioners.  A 
stranger  to  the  situation  and  the  man 
might  have  deemed  it  tmgracious  on  his 
part  to  decline  to  use  the  income  of  that 
fund  for  himself,  so  long  as  he  was  able 
to  continue  at  his  post;  but  his  friends 
recognized  that  it  was  simply  the  sternly 
conscientious  Christian  man  —  with  a 
touch  of  the  old  Puritan  in  him  coming  out 
once  more  in  the  sweet  guise  of  self-denial 
—  refusing  to  divert  to  his  personal 
comfort,  even  if  deserved,  the  largess 
of  his  people,  which,  in  his  judgment, 
would  be  better  devoted  to  God's  poor. 


62         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

That  one  act  of  his,  in  its  rigid  charitable- 
ness, wrought  more  for  the  cause  of  Christ 
in  this  community  than  many  larger 
bounties  more  widely  advertised. 

In  any  account  of  him  one  trait  can- 
not be  passed  over:  his  instinctive  fac- 
ulty for  leading  men.  Real  leadership  is 
rare.  Most  men,  it  has  been  remarked, 
enjoy  the  luxury  of  being  commandeered 
in  thought  and  action.  But  every  now 
and  then  a  man  appears  who  is  born  to 
lead.  The  man  himself  could  not  tell 
how  he  does  it.  He  simply  is.  And  some- 
how, even  if  his  associates  at  times  mis- 
trust his  judgment,  they  find  positive 
delight  in  following  him  notwithstanding. 
Who  lives  shall  see  the  end  of  the  mat- 
ter; but  this  man  feels  sure  beforehand, 
and  never  quails.  He  does  not  accom- 
plish his  effects  by  ingenuity  or  subtlety, 
or  by  the  arts  of  petty  diplomacy;  but  in 


WILLIAM  REED  HUNTINGTON      63 

broad,  sudden  ways  he  does  what  he  wants 
and  says  what  he  means,  and  chooses 
from  his  followers  the  right  man  for  the 
right  place,  and  goes  ahead.  You  may  not 
say  that  he  possesses  this  or  that  single 
quality  conspicuously;  you  may  rather 
say  that  of  some  of  those  who  co-operate 
with  him  as  his  deputies.  But  although 
the  deputies  may  even  seem  to  surpass 
the  master  in  separate  quahties  of  brain 
or  of  morale,  nevertheless  he  dominates 
and  guides,  and  in  his  presence  dissent  is 
seldom  audible.  Not  that  he  has  an  over- 
weening and  disagreeable  ambition  to 
impress  himself,  but  there  is  an  aura  of 
personahty  about  the  master  which  silences 
opposition  and  secures  compliance  and 
fealty.  This  is  sometimes  so  even  if  the 
leader  be  not  a  supremely  good  man;  but 
when  genuine  goodness  is  superadded  to 
the  rest,  then  the  effect  is  beyond  compare. 


64         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

And  such  was  Dr.  Huntington.  What 
rendered  him,  as  a  leader,  most  difficult 
to  withstand,  was  his  intrepid  righteous- 
ness. Those  who  opposed  him  were 
obHged  to  feel  that  their  own  desires 
must  be  purged  of  much  dross  before 
they  could  compete  with  his.  His  strength 
was  as  the  strength  of  ten,  because  his 
heart  was  pure.  It  was  his  uncommon 
personal  integrity,  his  entire  truthfulness, 
that  fused  in  him  what  to  many  seemed 
to  be  the  contradictory  tendencies  of  his 
temperament,  radical  and  conservative. 
On  the  one  hand,  he  could  not  bear  that 
men  of  the  present  should  halt  and  stumble 
over  the  rubbish  of  the  past;  and  this 
made  him  radical  in  the  eyes  of  some. 
On  the  other  hand,  he  had  too  keen  a 
sense  of  the  continuity  and  vital  force 
of  human  history,  and  of  ecclesiastical 
institutions,  to  be  willing  to  break  rashly 


WILLIAM  REED  HUNTINGTON      65 

with  real  traditions;  so  that  he  often  sur- 
prised by  his  conservatism  people  who 
expected  him  to  be  radical.  Yet  both 
radicals  and  conservatives,  when  they 
were  personally  thrown  with  this  great 
leader,  ended  by  applying  to  him  the  say- 
ing of  the  prophet  Micah :  "  He  hath  shewed 
thee,  0  man,  what  is  good." 

He  saw  men  and  things  always  in  the 
mirror  of  eternity,  and  therefore  he  was 
a  man  of  prayer.  From  the  pulpit  of 
Grace  Church  he  made  his  hearers  feel 
that  they  were  set  apart  awhile  from 
the  flowing  of  time,  and  were  dealing 
with  the  life  that  shall  always  be.  We 
must  find  our  minimum  of  faith  not  out- 
side of  us,  but  in  us;  not  in  the  old  learn- 
ing or  experience  of  others,  nor  in  any 
science  outside  of  us  to-day,  but  within 
the  heart  of  whatever  science  or  experi- 
ence we  have  made  or  own.    He  would 


66         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

shake  religion  from  its  wrappings  for  us. 

New  York  will  be  a  different  place 
without  him.  We  want  these  public  souls 
—  men  who,  as  Carlyle  says,  know  God 
otherwise  than  by  hearsay,  and  can 
tell  us  what  divine  work  is  actually  to  be 
done  here  and  now  in  the  streets  of  New 
York,  and  not  of  a  different  work  which 
behooved  to  be  done  in  old  Judea  —  men 
of  whom  no  infidel  would  ever  think  what 
Voltaire  is  reported  to  have  said  of  the 
preacher  Massillon:  "It  is  in  vain  you 
try  to  preach  to  me,  for  you  are  not 
really  my  enemy."  Dr.  Huntington,  like 
the  rest  of  us,  was  overwhelmed  by  the 
awful  mystery  of  life  and  death,  of  past 
and  present  and  the  world  to  come;  yet 
in  it  all  there  was  for  him  but  one  control- 
ling question :  What  is  the  mind  of  Christ 
about  it?  and  what  the  great,  unresting, 
merciful    Heart    of    the    Universe?    Dr. 


WILLIAM  REED  HUNTINGTON      67 

Huntington  was  sure  that  Jesus  knows: 
that  whoso  hath  seen  Him  hath  seen  the 
Father;  and  that  by  His  Hfe  we  have  the 
Hght  of  the  knowledge  of  the  glory  of  God 
in  the  face  of  Jesus  Christ.  Therefore 
with  the  absorption  of  a  tireless,  effect- 
ive man,  as  a  disciple  of  Jesus,  loving  the 
work  more  than  the  rewards,  he  went 
about  doing  good;  and  his  works  do  fol- 
low him.  He  might  have  been  a  bishop; 
but  he  preferred  to  lead  from  lower  down; 
and  from  his  metropolitan  parish  his  influ- 
ence penetrated  to  the  corners  of  our  com- 
monwealth, and  far  beyond.  His  vision 
was  so  vast  of  the  possibilities  of  religion 
in  our  time  that  he  could  not  but  be  un- 
selfish: he  would  not  keep  for  himself 
what  was  meant  for  mankind.  For  him 
human  life,  in  Church  and  out  of  Church, 
is  a  perpetual  education  in  living  with 
God  and  loving  God;  and  to  be  alive  to 


68         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

beautiful  things  and  do  heroic  deeds  — 
to  smile  and  suffer  and  forbear;  to  choose 
what  is  hard  rather  than  what  is  easy, 
and  what  is  pure  rather  than  impure, 
here  on  earth  for  a  little  while  —  is  to 
perform  the  first  act  of  that  everlasting 
drama  which  is  eternal  life  with  God. 
So,  as  he  spoke  to  us  and  acted  in  our  midst, 
we  could  see  the  gaudia  certaminis  in  his 
face;  as  when,  in  Tennyson's  allegory  of 
the  Round  Table,  Sir  Galahad  answers 
to  the  protests  of  his  king,  who  would 
withhold  him  from  his  arduous  quest: 

"But  I,  Sir  Arthur,  saw  the  Holy  Grail. 
I  saw  the  Holy  Grail,  and  heard  a  cry  — 
O  Galahad,  and  O  Galahad,  follow  me." 


THE    RIGHT    REVEREND    HENRY 
CODMAN  POTTER 

SEVENTH    BISHOP    OF    NEW    YORK 


THE    RIGHT    REVEREND    HENRY 
CODMAN  POTTER 

On  Tuesday,  September  15,  1908,  at  a 
regular  quarterly  meeting  of  the  Chapter 
of  the  Cathedral  of  St.  John  the  Divine, 
New  York,  the  undersigned  ^  were  ap- 
pointed a  Committee  to  draft  a  Minute 
expressive  of  the  Chapter's  feelings  in 
view  of  the  death  of  our  Bishop,  the 
Rt.  Rev.  Henry  Codman  Potter,  D.D., 
LL.D.,  D.C.L.,  at  Cooperstown,  N.Y., 
on  Tuesday,  July   21. 

The  shock  of  his  death  came  to  the 
members  of  our  Chapter  at  a  season  when 
we  were  widely  scattered,  yet  the  lapse  of 
time  has  but  made  us  more  conscious  of 


^The  names  of  the  Committee  were: 

George  F.  Nelson, 
George  William  Douglas, 
Ernest  Voorhis. 


72         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

the  difficulty  of  giving  adequate  expres- 
sion to  the  sentiments  that  fill  our  hearts. 
For  Bishop  Potter  was  no  ordinary  man  — 
no  ordinary  ecclesiastic.  He  was  cast 
in  a  large  mould,  with  a  robust  personal- 
ity distinctly  his  own;  as  has  been  amply 
declared  by  the  numerous  letters  and  tes- 
timonials, from  home  and  abroad,  which 
have  been  published  concerning  him. 
It  is  not  the  duty  of  this  Cathedral 
Chapter  to  attempt  to  trace  the  outlines 
of  his  long,  laborious,  and  successful  life, 
whether  as  pastor,  as  preacher,  as  secre- 
tary of  the  House  of  Bishops,  as  assistant 
bishop,  or  as  the  ecclesiastical  head  of 
this  most  important  and  difficult  diocese, 
which  requires  a  greater  variety  of  epis- 
copal abilities  than  any  other  in  our  Amer- 
ican Church.  Beginning  his  career  in 
the  counting-house  of  a  mercantile  con- 
cern   in    Philadelphia,    early   in   life   he 


REV.  HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER      73 

turned  of  his  own  accord  to  the  calling  of  a 
Christian  minister;  for  which,  beside  the 
preparation  of  his  distinguished  parent- 
age, he  had,  as  the  sequel  showed,  a 
distinct  vocation  of  his  own  from  Jesus 
Christ,  the  Shepherd  and  Bishop  of  our 
souls.  And  on  everything  that  he  touched 
from  youth  to  old  age  he  left  his  mark. 
Endowed  with  rare  social  gifts,  aristo- 
cratic in  his  tastes  and  of  cultured  breed- 
ing, he  was  heartily  democratic  in  his 
sympathies,  with  a  strong  sense  of  civic 
duty  guided  and  controlled  by  his  con- 
sciousness of  responsibility  as  an  ambas- 
sador of  Christ.  As  shown  by  his  Yale 
Lectures  on  "The  Citizen  in  his  Relation 
to  the  Industrial  Situation,"  he  despised 
the  spirit  of  social  caste;  and  the  ideal  of 
social  brotherhood  aroused  his  energies 
to  practical  effect  throughout  his  min- 
istry.   To  his  mind,  this  was  a  part  of 


74         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

his  prophetic  function.  Although,  as  has 
been  well  said  of  him,  he  loved  to  be  alone 
with  his  Bible  and  Prayer  Book,  brood- 
ing over  life's  mysteries  and  problems; 
although,  wise  man  that  he  was,  he  was 
reticent  of  much  that  his  large  heart  and 
fair  mind  knew  of  the  backwaters  and 
eddies  of  human  enterprise  and  morality; 
although  he  denied  himself  many  an  oppor- 
tunity to  tell  all  that  he  believed  to  be 
true,  and  much  that  was  dear  to  him,  — 
nevertheless  in  times  of  political  emer- 
gency, national  or  local,  and  in  moments 
of  social  derangement,  he  was  never  silent 
when  speech  from  him  was  really  called 
for,  and  he  had  an  intense  sense  of  social 
compunction.  All  through  his  life  lay- 
men who  were  in  close  companionship 
with  him  set  singular  value  on  his  friend- 
ship and  felt  the  spell  of  his  personal 
charm;   and   there   are   obscure    country 


REV.  HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER      75 

homes  and  rectories  where  his  visits  were 
an  event,  as  the  coming  of  one  who, 
though  he  was  a  citizen  of  the  great  world 
of  which  they  saw  httle,  yet  found  their 
simple  firesides  so  truly  interesting  that 
they  miss  him  now.  He  always  aimed  to 
get  so  in  touch  with  every  man,  and  with 
every  party  of  men,  that  they  might  be 
sure  of  his  sympathy  as  their  father  in 
God,  who  entered  into  their  life.  He 
never  tried  to  hide  the  breadth  and  vigor 
of  his  natural  tastes,  his  simple  enjoyment 
of  God's  world;  but  all  men  could  see  that 
he  held  himself  in  the  leash  of  self-denial, 
wearing  the  yoke  of  Christ.  It  was  felt 
that  he  really  sought  to  use  this  world, 
as  not  abusing  it;  for  the  fashion  of  this 
world  passeth  away.  Masterful  by  nat- 
ural disposition,  and  possessed  during  his 
manifold  career  of  many  opportunities  of 
mastery,  he  tried  faithfully  to  rule  by  love, 


76         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

and  by  the  power  of  good  judgment  and 
the  patient  expectation  of  good  will  on 
the  part  of  those  with  whom  he  had  to 
do.  With  the  statesman's  genius  for 
perceiving  the  time-spirit  —  the  momen- 
tary reactions  and  tendencies  of  men  and 
things  which  no  mere  man  can  stem  — 
he  would  quickly  take  the  lead  when  he 
saw  opportunities  of  civic  usefulness  for 
those  who  call  themselves  Christians; 
with  the  result  that  the  Bishop  of  New 
York  became,  during  his  episcopate,  a 
more  potent  factor  than  ever  before  in 
this  community  of  vast  organizations  and 
strong  individualities.  In  him  the  per- 
sonality promoted  the  office,  and  the  office 
sanctioned  the  personality.  Beside  the 
influence  of  his  charm  and  impressiveness 
in  personal  intercourse,  he  was  an  accom- 
plished speaker  in  the  pulpit  and  on  the 
platform,  uniting  ease  with  earnestness, 


REV.  HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER      77 

grace  with  dignity,  a  lambent  wit  with 
unfeigned  sympathy.  Hence  among  all 
who  came  within  his  range  there  is  a  feel- 
ing that  a  noble  figure  has  vanished  from 
our  midst. 

And  in  matters  more  strictly  ecclesias- 
tical, after  twenty-five  years  of  compara- 
tive concord  in  his  diocese,  by  virtue  of 
his  fair-mindedness,  he  might  truly  have 
made  his  own  the  remark  of  the  late  Bishop 
Wilberforce  of  Oxford,  England:  "I  should 
scorn  to  be  the  bishop  of  a  party,  because 
I  am  a  bishop  of  the  Church  of  Christ." 
In  a  very  real,  though  different,  sense 
Bishop  Potter  did  for  his  diocese  what 
John  Henry  Newman,  in  his  farewell 
sermon  to  his  congregation  at  Littlemore, 
hinted  that  he  had  done  for  them;  he 
interpreted  his  diocese  to  itself;  reflected 
and  made  vivid  and  energetic  the  disposi- 
tion and  desires  and  views  of  the  people 


78         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

committed  to  his  care:  "read  their  wants 
and  feehngs  to  them,  and  comforted  them 
by  the  very  reading." 

Such  were  the  quahties  that  rendered 
Bishop  Henry  Codman  Potter  impress- 
ive in  this  cathedral;  which,  by  the  coin- 
cidence of  time,  will  be  his  monument, 
since  it  came  into  visible  being  during 
his  episcopate,  and  here  his  body  shall  be 
entombed.  In  view  of  his  fine  apprecia- 
tion of  the  beautiful  and  the  imposing,  it 
is  fitting  that  his  monument  should  be 
a  feature  of  what  he  hoped  would  be  a 
great  and  solemnizing  temple  to  God  Most 
High.  According  to  its  constitution,  this 
cathedral  is  intended  to  be  a  house  of  God 
for  all  people,  and  it  was  indeed  to  all  the 
people  that  our  Bishop  addressed  himself. 
He  desired  the  cathedral  to  be  a  conse- 
crated acknowledgment  of  human  rela- 
tionship in  the  presence  of  the  Heavenly 


REV.  HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER      79 

Father,  and  under  the  sign  of  the  Cross. 
After  returning  from  Europe  several  years 
ago,  speaking  of  the  scheme  for  cathedral 
work  and  maintenance,  the  Bishop  said: 
"I  am  confirmed  in  my  opinion  that  our 
plans  regarding  the  new  cathedral  which 
our  Church  is  building  in  this  city  are 
wise.  I  refer  to  the  endowment  feature. 
I  attended  service  in  St.  Paul's  Cathedral, 
in  London,  only  a  few  Sundays  ago,  and  I 
witnessed  a  most  impressive  spectacle  — 
eight  thousand  people  gathered  under  the 
great  dome  to  worship.  There  was  the 
'cabby'  in  his  fustian  jacket,  the  porter 
and  the  railroad  man,  rubbing  elbows 
with  the  aristocracy  of  Great  Britain. 
That  is  essentially  the  cathedral  idea." 

Indeed,  in  the  Bishop's  ideas  for  the 
cathedral  that  same  underlying  feeling 
for  the  people  and  about  the  people  was 
ever  present,  which,  in  a  different  connec- 


8o         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

tion,  he  expressed  so  beautifully  in  his 
memorable  address  on  the  occasion  of  the 
unveiling  of  the  monument  to  the  soldier 
dead  of  New  York  on  the  field  of  Get- 
tysburg. "There  is,"  he  said,  "no  great- 
ness in  the  people  equal  to  a  great  vision 
in  an  emergency,  and  with  a  great  courage 
with  which  to  seize  it.  And  that,  I  main- 
tain, was  the  supreme  glory  of  the  heroes 
whom  we  commemorate  to-day.  Do  you 
tell  me  that  they  were  unknown,  that  they 
commanded  no  battalions,  determined  no 
policies,  sat  in  no  military  councils,  rode 
at  the  head  of  no  regiments?  Be  it  so! 
All  the  more  are  they  the  fitting  repre- 
sentatives of  you  and  me  —  the  people." 

It  was  with  such  feelings  for  the  people 
that  our  Bishop  went  on  with  the  building 
of  this  cathedral,  and  gathered  about  him 
the  Cathedral  Chapter.  He  wanted  his 
cathedral  church  to  help  the  Church  gen- 


REV.  HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER      8i 

erally  to  rise  above  the  mere  parochial 
spirit  of  a  previous  generation,  and,  like 
St.  Paul,  "to  be  all  things  to  all  men, 
that  we  may  by  all  means  save  some." 
He  wanted  us  to  be  deeply  interested  in 
the  sociological  field  of  the  Church;  to 
study  the  causes  and  the  symptoms  of 
poverty,  and  of  general  misfortune  and 
demoralization,  whether  of  rich  or  poor. 
His  conception  of  the  Christian  ministry 
was  broad  and  thorough,  and  he  wanted 
his  cathedral  to  become  the  focus  of  the 
activities  of  all  his  ministers,  clerical  and 
lay,  imparting  the  consecration  of  the 
altar  to  occupations  that  too  often  are 
scattered  and  unconscious  of  such  conse- 
cration. He  wanted  the  cathedral  to  be 
the  "unifying  centre"  of  all  those  activ- 
ities of  his  people  which  are  diocesan  in 
their  scope ;  and,  so  far  as  in  him  lay,  he 
hoped  to  make  it  a  symbol  of  that  larger 


82         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

Christian  unity  for  which,  to-day  more 
than  ever,  the  Christian  denominations 
are  praying  and  working.  He  wanted 
our  Cathedral  Chapter  to  foster  the  mis- 
sionary spirit  at  home  and  abroad.  Under 
the  Bishop  as  the  Chapter's  head,  he 
wanted  us  to  be  a  college  (in  the  original 
sense  of  the  old  Latin  term)  of  learned, 
versatile,  tactful,  and  sincere  ministers 
of  the  faith  of  the  Gospel,  with  diversi- 
ties of  gifts  but  the  same  Spirit;  rightly 
dividing  the  word  of  truth;  co-operating 
in  good  works;  devoting  our  combined 
energies  of  study  and  reflection  and  prayer 
and  ministration  so  as  to  put  our  Church 
and  diocese  in  touch  with  the  vast  op- 
portunities of  this  metropolis  —  with  the 
wants  alike  of  the  toiling  masses  and  of 
the  learned  and  leisured  few.  He  wanted 
our  worship  to  be  free  for  all  and  an  edu- 
cation to  all;  uplifting;  echoing  and  ex- 


REV.  HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER      83 

pressing  day  by  day  the  appeal  of  Christ 
our  Master:  "Come  unto  Me,  all  ye  that 
labor  and  are  heavy  laden,  and  I  will  give 
you  rest.  Take  My  yoke  upon  you,  and 
learn  of  Me;  for  I  am  meek  and  lowly  in 
heart:  and  ye  shall  find  rest  unto  your 
souls.  For  My  yoke  is  easy,  and  My 
burden  is  hght." 

All  this  our  Bishop  wanted  of  his  Cathe- 
dral Chapter;  and  he  wanted  it,  not  as  an 
artificial  acquisition  of  his  mind  reflecting 
what  others  had  desired  and  what  he  had 
elsewhere  seen,  but  as  the  true  expression 
of  his  own  personality,  the  ideal  which 
long  experience  had  wrought  in  him  as 
he  grew  in  grace,  and  in  the  knowledge  of 
our  Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ. 

Having  felt  hitherto  the  fascination  of 
his  presence,  the  impress  of  his  mind  in 
all  these  matters,  we  gather  now  to  offer 
our  grateful  and  respectful  tribute  to  his 


84        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

distinguished  memory;  for  God  has  called 
him  to  the  larger  life.  Missing  his  famil- 
iar form,  conscious  of  our  loss,  it  is  our 
duty  and  privilege  to  go  forward  in  his 
spirit,  and  do  our  parts  in  the  work  which 
he  laid  upon  us.  That  work  shall  be  our 
constant  reminder  of  him,  until  our  day 
is  done.  And  the  harder  we  labor  at  our 
several  tasks,  the  better  shall  we  appre- 
ciate the  scope  and  the  devotion  to  duty 
of  our  great  Bishop,  who  for  twenty-five 
years  bore  on  his  shoulders  a  burden  of 
responsibility  and  toil  that  would  have 
overborne  ten  ordinary  men.  To  the 
end  he  bore  it  well,  and  made  no  sign, 
until  under  the  stress  of  it  his  physical 
strength  suddenly  gave  way.  To  the 
very  end  his  keen  and  hearty  humor,  his 
consideration  for  others,  his  cheeriness 
—  he  was  the  least  worried  person  in  his 
sickroom  —  his   rare   vitality,   his   broad 


REV.  HENRY  CODMAN  POTTER      85 

interest  in  general  affairs,  and  his  indom- 
itable patience  prevailed. 

To  his  wife  and  children  we  offer  our 
respectful  sympathy,  praying  that  in  God's 
good  time,  when  the  harvest  is  ready,  we 
and  they  and  he  whom  now  we  mourn 
may  all  be  gathered  into  the  heavenly 
gamer.  Grant  him,  0  Lord,  eternal  rest, 
and  may  perpetual  light  shine  on  him. 


THE     REVEREND      CANON 
LAURENCE  HENRY  SCHWAB 


THE  REVEREND   CANON 
LAURENCE  HENRY  SCHWAB  ^ 

Laurence  Henry  Schwab  was  born  in 
New  York  in  1857,  and  was  a  son  of  Gustav 
Schwab  and  his  wife  Catherine  EHzabeth 
von  Post.  He  was  graduated  from  Yale 
College  in  the  class  of  1878;  and,  after 
studying  for  Holy  Orders  at  the  Union 
Theological  Seminary,  New  York,  and  at 
the  Divinity  School  in  Philadelphia,  he 
was  ordered  deacon  by  Bishop  Horatio 
Potter  in  1 88 1.  He  served  as  curate  to 
the  Rector  of  St.  Michael's  Church,  New 
York,  1881-82.  He  was  then  ordered 
priest,  and  served  at  Grand  Island, 
Nebraska,   1882-83;   after  which  he  was 

^  This  minute  was  written  at  the  request  of  the  fol- 
lowing Committee  of  the  New  York  Clerical  Club: 

George  William  Douglas, 
LoRiNG  W.  Batten, 
Henry  Mottet. 


90         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

associated  with  the  Reverend  Dr.  William 
R.  Huntington,  as  curate  at  All  Saints' 
Church,  Worcester,  Massachusetts,  1883- 
84.  Hence  he  passed  successively  to  cu- 
racies in  New  York  City  at  the  Church  of 
the  Nativity,  1884-86,  and  at  St.  Mark's 
Chapel,  1886-88.  In  1888  he  became 
Rector  of  St.  Mary's  Church,  Manhattan- 
ville;  and,  in  1899,  of  the  Church  of  the 
Intercession,  New  York.  Failing  health 
compelled  him  to  resign  his  rectorship 
in  1903;  whereafter,  for  short  periods,  he 
took  charge  of  churches  at  New  Windsor, 
on  the  Hudson,  and  at  Sharon,  Connecti- 
cut. Meanwhile,  on  Bishop  Henry  C. 
Potter's  nomination,  he  became  a  canon 
missioner  at  the  Cathedral  of  St.  John 
the  Divine.  He  died  on  the  Sunday  after 
Ascension,  May  28,  191 1,  leaving  a  widow 
and  one  son. 

It  is  a  short  record,  but  full  of  signifi- 


LAURENCE  HENRY  SCHWAB        91 

cance  to  all  who  knew  him.  Both  his 
first  sermon  and  his  last  were  delivered 
on  Ascension  Day;  and  in  spite  of  con- 
stant physical  weakness,  his  life  was  a 
continual  ascension,  mentally  and  spirit- 
ually, from  strength  to  strength.  This 
present  account  of  him  has  specially  to 
do  with  his  association  with  this  Club, 
which  he  valued  greatly,  and  for  which 
his  fitness  was  recognized  by  us  all.  His 
utterances  here,  like  his  numerous  arti- 
cles in  periodicals  and  newspapers,  were 
characterized  by  scholarly  tastes  and 
intense  mentality,  which  his  modesty 
and  fine  reserve  could  not  conceal.  He 
was  a  born  historian,  and  his  mind 
was  full  of  wide  and  just  historical  com- 
parisons whereby  his  view  of  present 
concerns  was  illuminated,  and  any  dis- 
position to  personal  prejudice  was  sweet- 
ened and  uplifted  by  a  note  of  personal 


92  ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

detachment.  His  piety  was  sincere  and 
deep,  for  he  was  a  man  of  prayer.  These 
traits  appeared  in  his  sermons,  which  were 
more  and  more  convincing,  and  more  and 
more  spiritual,  as  his  brief  life  neared 
its  earthly  close.  In  familiar  intercourse 
none  could  converse  with  him  without 
being  impressed  by  his  rare  integrity  and 
truthfulness,  by  his  exquisite  purity,  and 
by  his  affectionateness,  wistful  and  gentle. 
Withal  there  was  in  his  eye,  and  in  his 
whole  demeanor,  a  suggestion  of  the 
power  of  righteous  wrath  which  the  Psalm- 
ist includes  in  his  portrait  of  the  Good 
Man:  "He  doth  abhor  that  which  is  evil" 
—  the  same  trait  which  in  the  Apocalypse 
is  attributed  to  the  risen  Jesus:  "the 
wrath  of  the  Lamb."  Thus  he  seemed 
to  have  a  better  right  than  most  of  us  to 
use,  as  he  so  constantly  did,  the  language 
of  St.  Paul;  for  he  was  not  afraid  of  all 


LAURENCE  HENRY  SCHWAB        93 

that  is  involved  in  the  quest  of  righteous- 
ness and  truth:  he  had  counted  the  cost, 
and  was  ready  for  the  sacrifice.  To  him 
the  inner  world  was  real,  substantial; 
and  Paul's  zeal  —  the  zeal  of  the  climber 
from  grace  to  grace  —  belonged  to  him  by 
right  of  conquest. 

He  could  not  have  been  the  minister  of 
Christ  to  our  time  that  he  actually  was  — • 
to,  and  in,  our  time  —  without  experi- 
encing rehgious  difficulties  on  his  own 
account.  He  knew  and  felt  what  Modern- 
ism means.  Two  years  ago  he  volunteered 
to  an  intimate  friend  the  information  that 
at  one  time  he  had  serious  doubts  as  to 
one  point  of  our  Creed.  He  had  troubles 
about  prayer  and  God's  answers  to  it. 
The  Higher  Criticism  troubled  him  with 
fears  that  he  might  not  be  sure  that  he 
knew  as  much  of  the  life  and  utterances 
of  Jesus  Christ  as  he  had  formerly  beheved 


94         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

that  the  New  Testament  declares.  Never- 
theless, he  did  not  flinch;  and  to  those 
who  knew  what  went  on  in  his  soul,  it 
was  helpful  to  behold  how  he  kept  the 
faith.  It  was  most  appropriate  that  he 
had  been  commissioned  by  the  family  of 
Bishop  Henry  C.  Potter  to  write  his  biog- 
raphy; for  the  Bishop  admired  and  loved 
him,  and  he  understood  and  loved  the 
Bishop,  and  entered  into  the  public  spirit 
and  the  civic  sense  of  that  great  citizen- 
churchman.  But  this  task,  like  most  of 
his  other  earthly  tasks.  Canon  Schwab 
was  compelled  to  leave  unfinished  —  an 
uncompleted  manuscript  —  to  the  great 
loss  of  our  Church. 

Perhaps  the  last  touch  of  tragedy  was 
given  to  his  life  by  his  inability  to  share 
our  cathedral  work  just  at  the  moment 
when  the  opportunities  of  it  were  enlar- 
ging for  us  all.     That  work  appealed  to 


LAURENCE  HENRY  SCHWAB        95 

the  whole  of  hun  —  to  his  historic  informa- 
tion; to  his  instinct  of  social  service;  to 
his  desire  for  a  large  Christian  unity;  to 
his  sympathy  with  all  sorts  and  condi- 
tions of  men;  to  his  yearning  for  great 
things  for  the  spirit  of  man  as  the  candle 
of  the  Lord;  to  his  appreciation  of  wor- 
ship in  its  noblest  forms.  But  the  joy 
and  privilege  of  participating  in  our  cathe- 
dral opportunities  was,  like  so  much  else, 
withheld  from  him. 

In  conclusion,  may  we  not  lift  the  veil 
of  privacy  just  far  enough  to  say,  as  a 
simple  sign  of  his  natural  affiliation  with 
all  things  human,  that  he  came  to  his 
death  on  this  wise?  The  Friday  after 
Ascension  Day  and  his  last  sermon  at 
the  cathedral,  he  returned  to  Sharon, 
apparently  in  good  health  for  him.  As 
usual  he  had  spent  Sunday  evening  with 
his    wife,    each    quietly    reading.     About 


96         ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

nine  o'clock  he  stepped  out  on  the  veranda 
of  his  cottage  to  breathe  the  fresh  air 
and  look  at  the  stars,  and  to  make  sure 
that  his  pet  dog  was  all  right  for  the 
night.  There,  without  warning,  he  was 
taken  with  a  hemorrhage.  His  wife  lifted 
him  back  into  the  room,  but  he  soon  lost 
consciousness,  and  in  less  than  an  hour 
he  passed  to  his  long  home. 

Shall  we  say  that  the  struggle  naught 
availed?  He  knew,  and  knows,  better 
than  that.  To  those  whom  he  allowed 
to  share  his  inner  life  he  brought  his  own 
conviction  home:  that  failure  and  falling 
short  are  no  ground  for  despair:  that,  as 
Browning  puts  it,  at  last  Paracelsus  sees; 
since  with  God  there  is  no  waste.  God 
gathers  up  the  fragments,  and  the  reapers 
are  the  angels. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE: 
A  STUDY 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE: 

A  STUDY 

I 

Do  you  remember  Schumami's  bit  of 
music  which  he  entitled  Warum  —  Why? 
—  that  elusive  snatch  of  poignant,  plain- 
tive melody,  which  expresses  a  soul's 
surprise  over  the  mysterious  problem  of 
its  Hfe?  I  can  think  of  no  better  motto 
for  Cardinal  Newman's  life,  as  it  is  por- 
trayed in  Wilfred  Ward's  recent  volumes.^ 

This  article  is  not  intended  as  a  critique 
of  the  latest  biography  of  Newman,  but 
rather  as  an  expression  of  certain  feeUngs 
and  impressions  with  which  I  have  laid 
the  volumes  down.  As  one  thinks  of  that 
marvellous  career  as  a  whole,  one  wonders 
why   Newman's   unique    personality   was 

*"The  Life  of  John  Henry,  Cardinal  Newman,"  by 
Wilfred  Ward.     2  volumes.     Longmans,  191 2. 


loo       ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

so  winning  yet  so  unhappy,  so  widely 
influential  yet  so  abortive.  From  early 
youth  to  extreme  old  age  this  man  of 
extraordinary  vitality  possessed,  by  com- 
mon consent,  the  very  genius  of  religion. 
"God  was  in  all  his  thoughts."  This 
personal  recollection  of  God  reinforced 
and  fructified  all  his  other  powers,  tinged 
his  Uterary  style,  and  was  the  secret  of 
his  influence.  Others  might  tell  us,  but 
he  made  us  jeel  that  for  each  of  us  there 
is,  in  substance,  but  one  life  to  live  —  the 
life  with  God.  "As  the  eyes  of  a  maiden 
unto  the  hand  of  her  mistress,  even  so  his 
eyes  waited  upon  the  Lord  our  God." 
From  early  youth,  he  writes,  "I  beheved 
that  the  inward  conversion  of  which  I 
was  conscious  (and  of  which  I  am  still 
more  certain  than  that  I  have  hands  and 
feet)  would  last  into  the  next  life,  and  that 
I    was    elected    to    eternal    glory.     This 


NEWMAN  ONCE   MORE  loi 

belief  helped  in  confirming  me  in  my  mis- 
trust of  the  reality  of  material  phenomena, 
and  making  me  rest  in  the  thought  of 
two,  and  two  only,  absolute  and  lumi- 
nously self-evident  beings  —  myself  and 
my  Creator."  ^  And  far  on  toward  middle 
age,  in  his  "Grammar  of  Assent,"  he 
speaks  of  'Hhe  reality  of  conversion  as 
cutting  at  the  root  of  doubt,  providing 
a  chain  between  God  and  the  soul  that  is 
with  every  link  complete.  I  know  I  am 
right.  How  do  you  know  it?  I  know  that 
I  know."  2  Furthermore,  all  his  life  long, 
under  whatever  circumstances,  he  was 
conscious  that  he  had  a  mission  in  the 
world  —  "a  great  work  to  do  in  England." 
Why,  then,  was  he  so  continuously  un- 
happy, without  and  within?  and  why, 
from  any  standpoint  of  earthly  results, 
did  he  so  continuously  fail?    In  spite  of 

1  Vol.  I.,  p.  30.       ^  "Grammar  of  Assent,"  p.  197.  . 


I02        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

his  splendid  popularity  —  of  the  multi- 
tudes who  loved  him,  and  were  grateful 
to  him,  though  they  never  even  saw 
him  —  why,  from  first  to  last,  did  he 
arouse  such  antagonism?  And  why,  at 
stage  after  stage,  from  his  own  point  of 
view  —  from  the  standpoint  of  his  inten- 
tions and  overt  aims  —  was  his  life,  not 
only  so  sad,  but  so  ineffectual?  Why 
did  he  puzzle  people  in  general?  and 
why  were  most  of  his  best  friends  always 
uneasy  about  him?  For  it  would  seem 
as  if,  of  all  his  many  friends,  only  three 
were  never  really  uneasy  about  him,  and 
always  elicited  his  absolute  confidence  — 
gave  him,  in  the  human  sense,  entire 
satisfaction:  Frederick  Rogers  and  R.  W. 
Church  and  Ambrose  St.  John  —  two  of 
them  Anglicans  to  the  last;  the  third  an 
Anglican  who  went  over  to  the  Church 
of  Rome  with  Newman,  and  was  with 


NEWMAN   ONCE   MORE  103 

him  in  the  Oratory.  Of  course,  in  the 
first  place,  it  is  a  case  of  "The  Hour 
and  the  Man."  The  Tractarian  Move- 
ment, as  a  whole,  shows  that  the  Church 
of  England  was  ready  for  Newman.  The 
epoch  found  a  voice  in  him  —  something 
which  neither  Keble  nor  Palmer  nor 
Pusey  could  say,  he  had  to  say;  and 
England  wanted  to  have  it  said,  even 
though  Newman  himself  had  hardly  said 
it  before  he  changed  his  mind  and  moved 
on  further  than  England  could  follow. 

But  if  we  would  understand  and  do 
justice  to  Newman  as  a  personality,  and 
if  we  would  explain  why  his  influence  has 
been  so  helpful  to  ourselves,  our  analysis 
of  his  character  and  career  must  be  deeper 
and  more  intimate.  Our  question  there- 
fore resolves  itself  into  three,  each  of 
which  is  equally  applicable  throughout 
the    two    great    divisions    of   his    career, 


I04       ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

first  in  the  Church  of  England,  and  after- 
wards in  the  Roman  CathoHc  Church. 

First,  why  was  Newman's  Ufe  not 
only  so  abortive  of  the  results  which 
he  intended,  but  so  out  of  harmony, 
at  every  stage,  with  his  immediate 
surroundings? 

Secondly,  why  did  he  so  constantly 
puzzle  his  associates  and  arouse  such 
personal  antagonism,  although  he  was  so 
greatly  admired? 

Thirdly,  why,  nevertheless,  was  New- 
man's personal  influence  in  his  genera- 
tion so  pervasive  and  so  powerful?  and 
what  was  ihe  real  nature  of  his  influ- 
ence? 

Someone  has  remarked  of  Hamlet  that 
the  reason  why  Shakespeare's  play  has 
held  the  stage  is,  that  Hamlet  is  inscru- 
table. Newman  is  elusive,  but  he  is  not 
inscrutable,  in  the  sense  of  Hamlet;  and 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  105 

the  more  one  ponders  his  Hfe  and  writ- 
ings, the  more  one  seems  to  find  a  suffi- 
cient explanation  of  him. 

NewTnan  was  perpetually  out  of  agree- 
ment with  his  surroundings,  whether 
AngHcan  or  Roman  Catholic,  because  he 
was  by  nature  one  of  the  most  individual 
persons  that  ever  lived.  His  aloofness 
was  as  instinctive  as  his  insight  was  thor- 
ough. No  matter  whom  he  might  be 
thrown  with,  he  reacted.  He  could  not 
but  play  a  lone  hand.  He  had  it  in  him 
to  be  a  leader  of  men,  but  at  every  crisis 
he  sacrificed  his  leadership  to  his  deter- 
mination to  stand  alone.  In  all  human 
movements  party  combinations  are  gen- 
erally necessary  in  order  to  accomplish 
practical  results;  but  Newman  could  not 
work  with  any  party  —  could  not  "give 
to  a  party  what  was  meant  for  mankind." 


io6        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

As  Father  Ryder  puts  it,  "he  had  too  keen 
a  sense  of  individuahty  to  enforce  the 
necessary  drill."  What  he  wrote  to  Sis- 
ter Maria  Pia,  in  his  sixty-ninth  year,  is 
an  accurate  description  of  his  whole 
career:  1  "Like  St.  Gregory  Nazianzen,  I 
like  going  on  my  own  way,  and  having 
my  time  my  own.  .  .  .  Put  me  into 
official  garb,  and  I  am  worth  nothing; 
leave  me  to  myself,  and  every  now  and  then 
I  shall  do  something.  Dress  me  up,  and 
you  will  soon  have  to  make  my  shroud 
—  leave  me  alone  and  I  shall  Uve  my 
appointed  time.  Now  do  take  this  in, 
as  a  sensible  nun."  His  own  verse,  "Thou 
couldst  a  people  raise,  but  couldst  not 
rule,"  was  applicable  to  himself,  he  tells 
us. 2  His  sympathies  were  of  the  strong- 
est and  sweetest,  and  his  ability  to  under- 
stand and  appreciate  another's  point  of 

1  Vol.  II.,  p.  281.  2  Vol.  II.,  p.  353. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  107 

view  was  extraordinarily  keen;  but  his 
personal  independence  was  indomitable.  In 
this  respect  his  own  description  of  himself 
was  accurate:  "He  rested  in  the  thought 
of  two,  and  two  only,  absolute  and  lumi- 
nously self-evident  beings  —  himself  and 
his  Creator."  Hence  his  strong  objection 
to  those  who,  as  he  expressed  it,  ''strove 
to  narrow  the  terms  of  communion,"  ^ 
and  unduly  to  curtail  among  Roman 
Catholics  the  liberty  of  thought  which 
he  beheved  to  be  the  Catholic's  birth- 
right. He  thought  of  every  Christian  as 
in  the  same  direct  relation  with  God  as 
he  himseK  was;  and  therefore  his  sense 
of  shortcomings  and  imperfections  which 
God  permits  within  the  Church  no  more 
impaired  his  conviction  of  the  Church's 
divine  mission,  than  his  sense  of  the  evil 
in  the  world  diminished  his  certainty  of 

1  Vol.  I.,  p.  24. 


io8        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

God's  providence.  He  was  not  intoler- 
ant of  wide  differences  within  the  Chris- 
tian pale.  Within  large  limits  he  wanted 
to  live  and  let  live.  In  this  regard  his 
complaint,  first  against  the  Anglican 
Church  authorities  and  afterwards  against 
the  Roman  Catholic  authorities,  was  the 
same:  that  they  had  no  use  for  some  of 
the  best  and  most  loyal  children  of  the 
Church.  What  he  said  against  the 
Church  of  England,  in  his  sermon  on 
"The  Parting  of  Friends,"  was  quite  con- 
sistent with  what  he  repeatedly  said 
later  against  the  Church  of  Rome.  In 
his  judgment  neither  the  one  nor  the 
other  encouraged  free  debate  among  loyal 
experts.  "Truth  is  wrought  out,"  he 
said,  "by  many  minds  working  freely 
together."  ^  "It  is  individuals,  and  not 
the  Holy  See,  that  have  taken  the  initia- 

i  Vol.  I.,  p.  23.    Cp.  II.,  p.  49. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  109 

tive  and  given  the  lead  to  the  CathoHc 
mind  in  theological  inquiry."  ^  For  his 
own  part,  he  believed  that  he  was  claim- 
ing for  himself  no  other  welcome  than  had 
been  willingly  accorded  for  centuries  to 
freedom  of  debate  in  the  mediaeval  schools 
as  to  the  problems  of  their  time;  and  it 
was  because  he  nowhere  obtained  for 
himself  such  freedom  —  the  freedom  which 
he  was  eager  to  accord  to  his  fellow- 
Churchmen  —  that,  wherever  he  was,  all 
his  life  long  there  was  a  note  of  discord. 
He  must  still  go  on  wistfully  seeking  the 
home  welcome  which  haply  none  of  us 
shall  completely  find,  till  we  arrive  at 
"the  Jerusalem  above,  which  is  free,  the 
mother  of  us  all."  Whether,  if  he  could 
have  foreseen  that  he  would  be  as  lonely 
in  the  Roman  Church  as  he  was  in  the 
Anglican,  he  would   ever  have  left  the 

1  Vol.  II..  p.  39. 


110        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

Anglican  Church,  is  an  unanswerable  in- 
quiry. Liddon  and  Pusey  and  Keble 
and  R.  W.  Church  conjectured  that  he 
would  not;  but  no  one  can  be  sure.  Prob- 
ably it  was  a  matter  that  would  have 
been  determined  by  his  decision  as  to 
whether  the  sacrament  of  Holy  Com- 
munion, as  administered  in  the  Church  of 
England,  did,  or  did  not,  assure  to  him 
the  presence  of  Christ.  ^  In  John  Ing- 
lesant,  Mr.  Shorthouse  gives  us  an  im- 
aginary portrait  of  one  who  found  the 
sacramental  presence  as  truly  in  the  Eng- 
Hsh  as  in  the  Roman  rite.  Whether 
Newman  could  have  been  an  Inglesant  we 
shall  never  know.  But  it  is  impossible 
not  to  raise  the  question  when,  as  late  as 
1868,  we  come  across  Canon  Irvine's 
pathetic  description  of  his  unexpected 
meeting  with  Newman  at  Littlemore,  as 

1  Cp.  Vol.  I.,  p.  577. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  iii 

the  aged  priest  was  visiting  unbeknown 
his  old  home:  ^ 

"I  was  passing  by  the  church  at  Little- 
more  when  I  observed  a  man  very  poorly 
dressed  leaning  over  the  lych  gate  crying. 
He  was  to  all  appearances  in  great  trouble. 
He  was  dressed  in  an  old  gray  coat  with  the 
collar  turned  up  and  his  hat  pulled  down 
over  his  face  as  if  he  wished  to  hide  his  fea- 
tures. As  he  turned  toward  me  I  thought  it 
was  a  face  I  had  seen  before.  The  thought 
instantly  flashed  through  my  mind  it  was 
Dr.  Newman,  I  had  never  seen  him,  but  I 
remembered  Mr.  Crawley  had  got  a  photo  of 
Dr.  Newman.  I  went  and  told  Mr.  Craw- 
ley I  thought  Dr.  Newman  was  in  the  village, 
but  he  said  I  must  be  mistaken,  it  could  not 
be.  I  asked  him  to  let  me  see  the  photo, 
which  he  did.  I  then  told  him  I  felt  sure  it 
was  [he].  Mr.  Crawley  wished  me  to  have 
another  look  at  him.  I  went  and  met  him 
in  the  churchyard.  He  was  walking  with 
Mr.  St.  John.    I  made  bold  to  ask  him  if 

1  Vol.  II.,  p.  206. 


112        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

he  was  not  an  old  friend  of  Mr.  Crawley's, 
because  if  he  was  I  felt  sure  Mr.  Crawley 
would  be  very  pleased  to  see  him;  as  he  was 
a  great  invalid  and  not  able  to  get  out  him- 
self, would  he  please  to  go  and  see  Mr.  Craw- 
ley? He  instantly  burst  out  crying  and  said, 
'Oh  no,  oh  no!'  Mr.  St.  John  begged  him 
to  go,  but  he  said,  'I  cannot.'  Mr.  St.  John 
asked  him  then  to  send  his  name,  but  he  said, 
'Oh  no!'  At  last  Mr.  St.  John  said,  'You 
may  tell  Mr.  Crawley  Dr.  Newman  is  here.'" 

With  this  clue  —  the  indomitable  indi- 
viduality of  the  man  —  we  can  follow  his 
course  without  confusion,  and  we  can 
understand  why  three  of  his  friends  at 
least  were  never  fundamentally  per- 
plexed about  him.  When  he  turns  to 
Frederick  Rogers,  or  to  R.  W.  Church,  or 
to  Father  St.  John,  he  always  finds  that 
they  have  the  same  confidence  as  ever  in 
his  intellectual  and  moral  sincerity,  and 
^^coY  ad  COY  loquituY r    To  the  end  they 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  113 

manifested  to  him  the  trust  and  forbear- 
ance and  sympathetic  comprehension 
which  it  had  always  been  Newman's 
dream  to  find  in  his  ecclesiastical  supe- 
riors, but  which,  whether  in  the  Anglican 
or  in  the  Roman  Church,  he  generally 
failed  to  obtain.  For  these  three  friends 
of  his  perceived  that  from  crisis  to  crisis 
his  course  throughout  was  like  a  series  of 
the  subtlest  chemical  reactions,  in  which 
he  was  fundamentally  consistent  with 
himself.  Newman  was  always  Newman. 
Gladstone  brought  this  out  far  on  in 
Newman's  career  as  a  Roman  Catholic, 
when,  in  their  discussion  about  Vatican- 
ism and  the  Pope's  Infallibility,  Glad- 
stone pushed  Newman  to  the  wall  and 
drew  from  him  this  confession:  "If  I  am 
obliged  to  bring  religion  into  after-dinner 
toasts  (which  indeed  does  not  seem  quite 
the  thing),  I  shall  drink,  —  to  the  Pope, 


114        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

if  you  please,  —  still  to  conscience  first, 
and  to  the  Pope  afterwards."  ^  Private 
judgment  was  still,  as  always,  to  Newman 
the  most  sacred  function  of  the  human 
soul  —  the  ultimate  court  of  appeal  — 
"providing,"  as  he  said  in  the  passage 
already  quoted  from  his  "Grammar  of 
Assent,"  "a  chain  between  God  and  the 
soul  that  is  with  every  link  complete.  I 
know  I  am  right.  How  do  you  know  it? 
I  know  that  I  know."  Nor  did  he  have 
merely  the  courage  to  assert  this  to  a 
Protestant:  he  advocated  it  also  in  con- 
troversy with  Roman  Catholics.  Wit- 
ness his  article  in  the  Rambler,  "On 
Consulting  the  Faithful  in  Matters  of 
Doctrine,"  to  which,  in  a  letter  to  Sir 
John  Acton,  June  20,  i860,  he  alludes 
thus:  2  "I  wrote  an  Article  on  the  right  of 
the  Laity  to  be  consulted;  and,  as  you 

*  Vol.  II.,  p.  404.        *  Vol.  I.,  p.  636,  cp.  I.,  p.  502. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  115 

know,  I  thereby  incurred  a  good  deal  of 
odium.  It  was  this  defence  of  the  rights 
of  the  Laity  which  was  the  chief  cause  of 
the  Bishop's  dissatisfaction  with  me." 
Witness  again,  what  he  wrote  in  "The 
Grammar  of  Assent,"  in  1870,  when  he 
was  sixty-nine  years  old :  ^ 

"Conscience  .  .  .  is  always  what  the  sense 
of  the  beautiful  is  in  certain  cases;  it  is  always 
emotional.  No  wonder  then  that  it  always 
implies  what  that  sense  only  sometimes 
implies;  that  it  always  involves  the  recogni- 
tion of  a  living  object,  toward  which  it  is 
directed.  Inanimate  things  cannot  stir  our 
affections;  these  are  correlative  with  per- 
sons. If,  as  is  the  case,  we  feel  responsibility, 
are  shamed,  are  frightened,  at  transgress- 
ing the  voice  of  conscience,  this  implies  that 
there  is  One  to  whom  we  are  responsible, 
before  whom  we  are  ashamed,  whose  claims 
upon  us  we  fear.  If,  on  doing  wrong,  we 
feel  the  same  tearful,  broken-hearted  sorrow 

» Vol.  II.,  p.  265. 


ii6        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

which  overwhelms  us  on  hurting  a  mother; 
if,  on  doing  right,  we  enjoy  the  same  sunny 
serenity  of  mind,  the  same  soothing,  satis- 
factory deHght  which  follows  on  our  receiv- 
ing praise  from  a  father,  we  certainly  have 
within  us  the  image  of  some  person,  to  whom 
our  love  and  veneration  look,  in  whose  smile 
we  find  our  happiness,  for  whom  we  yearn, 
toward  whom  we  direct  our  pleadings,  in 
whose  anger  we  are  troubled  and  waste  away. 
These  feelings  in  us  are  such  as  require  for 
their  exciting  cause  an  intelligent  being: 
'The  wicked  flees,  when  no  one  pursueth'; 
then  why  does  he  flee?  whence  his  terror? 
Who  is  it  that  he  sees  in  solitude,  in  darkness, 
in  the  hidden  chambers  of  his  heart?  If  the 
cause  of  these  emotions  does  not  belong  to 
this  visible  world,  the  Object  to  which  his 
perception  is  directed  must  be  Supernatural 
and  Divine." 

Yet  Newman's  disappointment  at  not 
finding  anywhere  at  the  hands  of  his  fel- 
low-men the  reception  that  he  wanted, 
was  as  naive  as  that  of  a  child.     To  the 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  117 

end  of  his  career  he  was  "a  prisoner  of 
hope,"  though  his  hopefulness  lost  its 
original  buoyancy  after  the  failure  of  his 
plans  for  a  university  in  Ireland  and  for 
a  Roman  Catholic  college  at  Oxford. 

"I  have  generally  got  on  well  with  juniors, 
but  not  with  superiors,"  he  writes  concern- 
ing Manning.^  "As  to  the  Oxford  scheme,  it 
is  still  the  blessed  will  of  God  to  send  me 
baulks.  On  the  whole,  I  suppose,  looking 
through  my  Hfe  as  a  course,  He  is  using  me, 
but  really  viewed  in  its  separate  parts  it  is 
but  a  life  of  failures."  ^  "Well,  facts  alone 
will  make  them  recognize  the  fact  of  what 
a  laity  must  be  in  the  nineteenth  century  if 
it  is  to  cope  with  Protestantism."  ^  "The 
Anglican  Church  has  been  a  most  useful 
breakwater  against  scepticism.  ...  At  pres- 
ent it  upholds  far  more  truth  in  England 
than  any  other  form  of  religion  would,  and 
than  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  could."  * 


1  Vol.  II.,  p.  87.  '  Vol.  II.,  p.  69. 

2  Vol.  XL,  p.  67.  «Vol.  I.,  p.  651. 


ii8        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

"There  has  been  a  tradition  among  the  Ital- 
ians that  the  lay  mind  is  barbaric  —  fierce 
and  stupid  —  and  is  destined  to  be  outwitted, 
and  that  fine  craft  is  the  true  weapon  of 
Churchmen.  When  I  say  the  lay  mind,  I 
speak  too  narrowly  —  it  is  the  Saxon,  Teuton, 
Scandinavian,  French  mind."  ^  "But  the 
Latin  race  will  not  always  have  a  monopoly 
of  the  magisterium  of  Catholicism."  ^ 

While  he  was  an  Anglican,  Newman's 
instinctive  disposition  to  react  against 
his  surroundings,  whatever  they  might 
be,  manifested  itself  first  toward  the 
Evangelicals;  although  to  the  end  of  his 
life  some  of  their  phrases  and  forms  of 
thought  were  habitual  with  him.  Next, 
while  England  was  seething  with  the 
new  thought  of  natural  science,  Newman 
was  prompted  to  revive  in  Churchmen  the 
standards  and  the  spirit  of  the  primitive 
Church.     Hence  he  was  a  contributor  to 


1  Vol.  II.,  p.  141.  2  Vol.  II.,  p.  555. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  119 

the  Tracts  for  the  Times,  although  in  them 
he  played  a  lone  hand,  as  usual,  and  was 
a  thorn  in  the  side  of  Palmer,  who  origi- 
nated the  Tracts.  Ere  long  it  became 
evident  that  for  Newman  the  primitive 
Church  principles,  as  he  understood  them, 
were  insufficient;  and,  by  way  of  farther 
reaction,  he  must  superimpose  on  them 
some  mediaeval  habits  of  mind;  by  which 
combination  of  primitive  with  mediaeval 
ratiocination,  he  tried  to  find  the  Via 
Media  which  seemed  to  him  to  be  the  in- 
tention of  the  Church  of  England  at  the 
Reformation,  But  in  this  neither  Con- 
servatives nor  Liberals  could  run  far  with 
him;  and  so  the  first  act  of  his  fife's  drama 
was  concluded  —  a  drama,  but  not  a  tra- 
gedy, when  we  consider,  on  the  one  hand, 
the  wonderful  revival  of  personal  refigion, 
and  of  attachment  to  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land, to  which  Newman's  genius  for  piety 


I20        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

had  contributed;  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  exquisite  beauty  of  character  and 
humihty  of  spirit  which  Newman's  pain- 
ful conflict  had  developed  in  himself. 
For,  in  spite  of  some  superficial  appear- 
ances to  the  contrary,  he  had  become 
humble.  In  him  we  find  a  man  who, 
though  egotistical,  could  be  humble  be- 
cause he  was  unselfish.  He  had  the  char- 
ity which  seeketh  not  her  own.  In  his 
verses  from  Italy,  "Lead,  kindly  Light," 
written  just  before  the  Tractarian  Move- 
ment had  begun,  as  Newman  looked  back- 
ward over  his  early  years  he  confessed, 
"Pride  ruled  my  will";  but  by  the  time 
when  he  delivered  his  sermon  on  "The 
Parting  of  Friends,"  he  had  grown  to  be 
truly  humble.  He  went  on  exercising  his 
private  judgment  with  the  same  integrity; 
but  he  had  counted  the  cost,  and  he  did  so 
ever  afterward  as  a  bravely  humble  man. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  121 

*"With  me  it  is  a  very  small  thing  that  I 
should  be  judged  of  you,  or  of  man's  judg- 
ment: yea,  I  judge  not  mine  own  self. 
He  that  judge th  me  is  the  Lord." 

Thus  the  key  to  his  perpetual  hopeful- 
ness, on  the  one  hand,  and  to  his  perpet- 
ual discouragement  and  distress,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  his  indomitable  individual- 
ity, exercised  throughout  his  long  Hfe 
in  the  sphere  of  pure  religion.  I  have 
always  detected  a  resemblance  in  New- 
man to  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson.  Early 
in  the  Tractarian  days,  John  Anthony 
Froude  compared  Newman  to  Julius 
Caesar :  ^ 

"He  was  above  middle  height,  slight  and 
spare.  His  head  was  large,  his  face  remark- 
ably like  that  of  Julius  Caesar.  The  fore- 
head, the  shape  of  the  ears  and  nose  were 
almost  the  same.     The  lines  of  the  mouth 


^  "Newman's  Biography,"  Vol.  I.,  p.  61. 


122        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

were  very  peculiar,  and  I  should  say  exactly 
the  same.  I  have  often  thought  of  the 
resemblance,  and  believed  that  it  extended 
to  the  temperament.  In  both  there  was  an 
original  force  of  character  which  refused  to 
be  moulded  by  circumstances,  which  was  to 
make  its  own  way,  and  become  a  power  in 
the  world;  a  clearness  of  intellectual  percep- 
tion, a  disdain  for  conventionalities,  a  tem- 
per imperious  and  wilful,  but  along  with  it  a 
most  attaching  gentleness,  sweetness,  single- 
ness of  heart  and  purpose.  Both  were  formed 
by  nature  to  command  others,  both  had  the 
faculty  of  attracting  to  themselves  the  pas- 
sionate devotion  of  their  friends  and  followers. 
It  has  been  said  that  men  of  letters  are  either 
much  less  or  much  greater  than  their  writ- 
ings. ...  A  man  of  genius,  on  the  other  hand, 
is  a  spring  in  which  there  is  always  more  be- 
hind than  flows  from  it.  .  .  .  This  was  emi- 
nently true  of  Newman.  Greatly  as  his 
poetry  had  struck  me,  he  was  himself  all  that 
the  poetry  was,  and  something  far  beyond. 
I  had  then  never  seen  so  impressive  a  per- 
son. .  .  .  Nothing  was  too  large  for  him, 
nothing  too  trivial,  if  it  threw  light  upon  the 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  123 

central  question,  what  man  really  was,  and 
what  was  his  destiny." 

In  other  words,  transport  Julius  Caesar 
into  the  England  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury ;  make  him  utterly  unworldly  — 
caring  for  nothing  but  the  fortunes  of  the 
human  soul :  devoted  to  God  and  the  duties 
of  the  soul  with  passionate  intensity  — 
and  you  have  Newman  whether  in  the 
Church  of  England  or  in  the  Church  of 
Rome.  He  is  an  instance  of  profound 
and  pure  spiritual  passion,  as  pure  as  pos- 
sible for  man.  He  thought  himself  im- 
partial, but  no  human  being  can  be  quite 
impartial  and  also  profoundly  impassioned 
—  only  the  Perfect  Man,  the  God-Man 
on  the  Cross,  has  displayed  to  mankind 
the  combination  of  perfect  impartial- 
ity to  the  truth,  with  perfect  passion  for 
the  truth.  Yet  there  must  be  passion  in 
every  genuine  intellectual  leader  of  men. 


124        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

In  this  respect  Newman  reminds  us  of 
Count  Paul  von  Hoensbroech's  account 
of  himself  in  the  Introduction  to  his 
thrilling  narrative,  ''Fourteen  Years  a 
Jesuit,"  where  he  says:^ 

"But  though  my  judgment  is  impartial, 
its  expression  will  not  be  dispassionate,  for 
passion  only  dims  our  vision  and  weakens 
our  judgment  when  it  takes  possession  of  us 
before  the  object  has  been  grasped  by  our 
vision  and  understanding.  When  we  have 
recognized  and  understood,  then  we  may  call 
in  its  aid.  Indeed,  it  would  be  well  if  con- 
viction were  more  frequently  upheld  with 
passion.  There  would  be  less  uncertainty, 
weakness,  and  insincerity  in  the  world. 
Many  a  good  book  would  not  have  missed 
its  effect  had  it  been  written  with  more  of 
passion.  How  indeed  would  it  be  possible 
to  write  dispassionately  about  that  which 
has  stirred  our  souls  to  their  depths?" 

1  Vol.  I.,  p.  xiv.  Introduction.  "Fourteen  Years  a 
Jesuit,"  by  Count  Paul  von  Hoensbroech,  translated  by 
Alice  Zimmcrn.     Cassell  &  Co.,  New  York,  191 1. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  125 

II 

Not  long  after  Newman  had  gone  over 
to  Rome,  Charles  Kingsley  —  bluff  John 
Bull  personified  —  accused  him,  in  sub- 
stance, of  duplicity  and  Jesuitry.  By  his 
inquiry,  "What  then  does  Dr.  Newman 
mean?"  Kingsley  signified  that  Newman 
was  not  frank:  that  he  always  had  some- 
thing at  the  back  of  his  head  which  he 
did  not  tell.  But  in  the  judgment  of 
EngHsh  people  generally  Newman's  "Apo- 
logia" disposed  of  this  charge  entirely. 
Newman's  reply  to  Kingsley  was  cer- 
tainly an  exhibition  of  his  incomparable 
intellectual  dexterity;  but  it  showed  him 
to  be  what  R.  W.  Church  and  Rogers  and 
St.  John  always  beHeved  him  to  be  — 
quite  sincere  and  outspoken  —  a  trans- 
parent character.  He  always  meant  what 
he  said;  and  usually  his  rare  gift  of  expres- 


126        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

sion  and  illustration  enabled  him  to  say 
what  he  meant.  Now  and  then  indeed, 
like  all  persons  who  write  rapidly,  his 
language  was  obscure;  and  like  all  who 
are  very  shy,  he  sometimes  trusted  too 
much  that  his  correspondent  would  read 
between  the  lines.  His  letter  to  Bishop 
Ullathorne  ^  about  coming  to  Rome  for 
the  Cardinal's  hat  was  of  this  kind.  But 
in  general  the  trouble  was  that,  intellec- 
tually, he  was  not  only  subtle  and  keenly 
sensitive  to  his  immediate  environment, 
but  he  was  always  on  the  move,  —  back- 
wards or  forwards  according  to  the  occa- 
sion. Even  his  sermons  were  occasional, 
and  he  was  a  prolific  letter-writer.  It  is 
said  that  great  judges  avoid  writing  many 
letters  lest  their  casual  opinions  should 
conflict  with  their  formal  decisions.  But 
Newman,   even  in  his  books,  was  occa- 

>  Vol.  II.,  p.  439. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  127 

sional.  From  moment  to  moment  he 
expressed  his  mind,  but  he  continually 
changed  his  mind,  or  passed  to  another 
point  of  view;  and  at  every  move  he 
abounded  in  striking  arguments  for  his 
new  position.  Hereby  he  bewildered 
slow-moving  minds;  and  to  Kingsley  he 
appeared  to  be  —  not  like  a  bird  moving 
rapidly  in  the  sunshine  —  but  a  chame- 
leon, standing  still  and  changing  his  color 
in  order  to  elude  the  observer.  Kingsley 
did  not  recognize  that  whether  Newman's 
statements  were  objectively  true  or  not, 
they  were  subjectively  true:  that  he  was 
not  concealing,  but  uttering  his  mind. 

Perhaps,  paradoxical  as  it  may  appear, 
the  best  proof  of  Newman's  absolute 
truthfulness  was  an  incidental  one:  his 
unwillingness  to  proselytize.  For  this  the 
Romanists  never  forgave  him.  Just  at 
first  it  looked  as  if  he  might  do  what  had 


128        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

been  expected  of  him.  Yielding  to  the 
natural  desire  to  keep  with  him  some  of 
his  dearest  friends,  he  did  try  to  induce 
Henry  Wilberforce  and  a  few  others  to 
join  him  at  once  in  the  Church  of  Rome.^ 
But  he  soon  resumed  his  instinctive  aloof- 
ness. Thus  as  early  as  1850  he  writes  to 
Mr.  Capes: 

"As  far  as  the  people  are  concerned  our 
line  is  not  to  attack  the  Church  of  England, 
which  is  a  low  game."  ^ 

Again    in    i860    he    writes    to    Canon 

Estcourt : 

"I  should  have  the  greatest  repugnance 
to  introducing  controversy  into  those  quiet 
circles  and  sober  schools  of  thought  which 
are  the  strength  of  the  Church  of  England. 
It  is  another  thing  altogether  to  introduce 
controversy  to  individual  minds  which  are 
already  unsettled,  or  have  a  drawing  toward 
Catholicism.    Altogether  another  thing  in  a 

1  Vol.  I.,  pp.  133-134;  618.         2  Vol.  I.,  p.  261. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  129 

place  like  Birmingham,  where  nearly  every- 
one is  a  nothingarian,  or  an  infidel,  a  sceptic, 
or  an  inquirer.  Here  Catholic  efforts  are  not 
only  good  in  themselves,  and  do  good,  but 
cannot  possibly  do  any  even  incidental  harm 
—  here  whatever  is  done  is  so  much  gain. 
In  Oxford  you  would  unsettle  many,  and  gain 
a  few,  if  you  did  your  most."  ^ 

In  1864  he  writes  to  R.  W.  Church: 

"I  can  truly  say,  and  never  will  conceal, 
that  I  have  no  wish  at  all  to  do  anything 
against  the  Establishment  while  it  is  a  body 
preaching  dogmatic  truth,  as  I  think  it  does 
at  present."  ^ 

But  the  very  trait  which  attested  his 
fastidious  smcerity,  and  his  respect  for 
the  mind  of  others,  led  the  Romanists  to 
distrust  him  for  not  beuig  really  one  of 
themselves.  They  had  hailed  his  arrival 
in  their  midst,  because  they  expected  him 
to  be  the  first-born  of  many  brethren. 

1  Vol.  II.,  pp.  57,  58.  2  Vol.  II.,  p.  24. 


I30        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

If  he  believed  in  Romanism  why  did  he 
not  bestir  himself,  and  wield  his  magic 
wand,  and  throw  his  subtle  net,  until  all 
the  good  Anglicans  had  been  drawn  after 
him  to  Rome?  When  Romanists  found 
that  Newman  would  on  no  account  play 
this  role,  they  entertained  almost  the  same 
distrust  of  him  that  Kingsley  had;  so  that 
at  the  very  time  when  the  Anglicans  were 
coming  to  trust  Newman,  though  he  had 
gone  from  them,  the  Romanists  lost  con- 
fidence in  him,  although  he  had  come  to 
them.  They  could  not  perceive  that  he 
was  as  genuine  and  naive  as  ever,  and  that 
he  had  come  to  Rome  for  his  own  reasons, 
not  for  theirs:  that,  as  he  wrote  to  Canon 
Estcourt,  "Catholics  did  not  make  us 
Catholics;  Oxford  made  us  Catholics."  ^ 
The  fact  was  that  he  had  come  to  Rome 
as  an  idealist,  not  as  a  realist  —  as  a  Pla- 

^  Vol.  II.,  p.  57;  cp.  Vol.  II.,  pp.  110-127. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  131 

tonist,  not  as  an  Aristotelian;  and  his 
conviction  was  that  Rome  was  not  yet 
ready  for  most  AngUcans,  any  more  than 
most  Anglicans  were  ready  for  Rome. 
As  he  had  formerly  believed  that  "there 
was  a  great  work  for  him  to  do  in  Eng- 
land," so  now  he  believed  there  was  a 
great  work  for  him  to  do  in  Rome.  New- 
man was  still  Newman,  reacting  against 
his  environment  as  of  old.  He  was  now 
bent  on  reforming  the  Roman  communion, 
just  as  sincerely  as  formerly  he  had  been 
bent  on  reforming  the  Anglican  commun- 
ion. Yet  can  we  altogether  wonder  that 
Monsignor  Talbot  was  amazed  when,  in 
reply  to  the  invitation  which,  with  the 
Pope's  backing,  he  sent  to  Newman,  to 
come  from  England  and  preach  to  Prot- 
estant visitors  in  Talbot's  church  in 
Rome,  the  following  tart  reply  was  re- 
ceived: 


132        ESSAYS  IN  Al'PRECIATION 

"The  Oratory,  Birmingham,  July  25,  1864. 
"  Dear  Monsignore  Talbot,  —  I  have  received  your 
letter,  inviting  me  to  preach  next  Lent  in  your  church 
at  Rome  to  'an  audience  of  Protestants  more  educated 
than  could  ever  be  the  case  in  England.' 

"However,  Birmingham  people  have  souls;  and  I  have 
neither  taste  nor  talent  for  the  sort  of  work  which  you 
cut  out  for  me.     And  I  beg  to  decline  your  offer. 
I  am,  yours  truly, 

John  H.  Newman."  * 

So  Newman  failed  in  Rome  as  he  had 
failed  in  England,  and  for  a  similar  cause. 
The  Romanists  did  not  relish  his  atti- 
tude, and  they  were  suspicious  of  his  argu- 
ments, like  the  Trojans  with  the  Greeks. 
Even  when  he  offered  them  new  arms 
against  the  heretics  —  arms  which  he 
himself  often  wielded  effectively  —  they 
doubted  whereunto  this  would  grow. 
Newman  desired  to  convert  men  by  the 
instrument  of  thought,  ^  whereas  the  Ul- 
tramontanes  preferred  to  influence  them 
by  other  instruments  than  thought.     So, 

1  Vol.  II.,  p.  539.  *  Vol.  I.,  p.  122. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  133 

though  at  first  they  approved  his  project 
of  making  a  new  translation  of  the  Scrip- 
tures (with  Newman's  scholarship  and 
rare  gift  of  style  and  sense  of  rhythm,  how 
interesting  such  a  translation  might  have 
been!),  they  soon  discouraged  it,  and  it 
came  to  nothing.  As  the  wretched  years 
went  by,  time  and  again  the  support 
which  had  been  promised  him  from  head- 
quarters silently  slipped  away.  Each  en- 
terprise in  which  he  had  thought  that  he 
saw  God's  hand  guiding  him,  and  on  which 
he  had  set  his  heart,  came  to  naught; 
and  now  and  then  his  grief  finds  some  such 
bitter  record  as  this: 

"People  do  not  know  me  —  and  sometimes 
they  half  pass  me  by.  It  has  been  the  por- 
tion of  saints,  even ;  and  well  may  be  my  por- 
tion. He  who  gives  gifts  is  the  best  judge 
how  to  use  His  own.  He  has  the  sole  right 
to  do  as  He  will,  and  He  knows  what  He  is 
doing.     Yet  sometimes  it  is  marvellous  to 


134        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

me  how  my  life  is  going,  and  I  have  never 
been  brought  out  prominently  —  and  now  I 
am  likely  less  than  ever  —  for  there  seems 
something  of  an  iron  form  here,  tho'  I  may  be 
wrong;  but  I  mean  people  are  at  no  trouble 
to  deepen  their  views.  It  is  natural." ' 
"I  am  treated  as  some  wild,  incomprehensible 
beast,  a  spectacle  for  Dr.  Wiseman  to  exhibit 
to  strangers,  as  himself  being  the  hunter  who 
captured  it."  ^  "They  put  me  on  the  shelf, 
but  they  can't  prevent  me  from  peeping  out 
from  it."  ^ 

Again  in  his  diary: 

"'Not  understood'  —  this  is  the  point. 
I  have  seen  great  wants  which  had  to  be 
supplied  among  CathoHcs  —  especially  as  re- 
gards education  —  and  of  course  those  who 
labored  under  those  wants  did  not  know 
their  state,  —  and  did  not  see  or  understand 
the  want  of  all  —  or  what  was  the  supply  of 
the  want  —  and  felt  no  thankfulness  at  all, 
and  no  consideration  towards  a  person  who 
was  doing  something  toward  the  supply;  but 


1  Vol.  I.,  p.  173.    2  Vol.  I.,  p.  569.    » Vol.  I.,  p.  573. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  135 

rather  thought  him  restless  or  crotchety,  or 
in  some  way  or  other  what  he  should  not 
be.  This  made  me  think  of  turning  more 
to  God,  if  it  has  not  actually  turned  me.  It 
has  made  me  feel  that  in  the  Blessed  Sacra- 
ment is  my  great  consolation,  and  that,  while 
I  have  Him  Who  lives  in  the  Church,  the 
separate  members  of  the  Church,  my  supe- 
riors, though  they  may  claim  my  obedience, 
have  no  claim  on  my  admiration,  and  offer 
nothing  for  my  inward  trust.  I  have  ex- 
pressed this  feeHng,  or,  rather,  imphed  it, 
in  one  of  my  Dublin  sermons,  preached  in 
1856.  So  far  well  —  or  not  ill  —  but  it  so 
happens  that,  contemporaneously  with  this 
neglect  on  the  part  of  those  for  whom  I 
labored,  there  has  been  a  drawing  toward  me 
on  the  part  of  Protestants.  Those  very 
books  and  labors  of  mine  which  Catholics 
do  not  imderstand,  Protestants  did.  More- 
over, by  a  coincidence,  things  I  had  written 
years  ago,  as  a  Protestant,  and  the  worth  or 
force  of  which  were  not  understood  by  Prot- 
estants then,  are  bearing  fruit  among  Protes- 
tants now.  .  .  .  And  accordingly  I  have  been 
attracted  by  that  sympathy  to  desire  more 


136        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

of  that  sympathy,  feeling  lonely  and  fretting 
under,  not  so  much  the  coldness  toward 
me  (though  that  in  part)  as  the  ignorance, 
narrowness  of  mind,  and  self-conceit  of  those 
whose  faith  and  virtue  and  goodness,  never- 
theless, I  at  the  same  time  recognized.  And 
thus  I  certainly  am  under  the  temptation  of 
looking  out  for,  if  not  courting,  Protestant 
praise."  ^ 

How  truly  he  had  described  himself 
when  he  wrote  to  Mr.  Hutton  ^  that  noth- 
ing could  be  said  about  him,  in  praise 
or  blame,  which  did  not  "tear  off  his  mor- 
bidly sensitive  skin";  for  he  had  the 
artistic  temperament.  Toward  the  close 
of  his  life  he  spoke  of  TertuUian  as  one 
of  his  two  favorites  —  as  the  theological 
genius  —  among  the  early  Fathers  of  the 
Church;  adding,  says  Father  Ryder, 
"with  tears  in  his  voice,  if  not  in  his  eyes, 
how  frequently  the  initial  sin  of  heresy 

1  Vol.  I.,  pp.  577,  578.  2  Vol.  I.,  p.  20. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  137 

was  impatience."  ^  Was  this  a  hit  at 
himself?  If  it  was,  then  Newman  was 
now  saying  to  himself  what  Keble  had 
long  before  said  for  him: 

"Why  should  we  faint,  or  fear  to  live  alone, 
Since  all  alone,  so  Heaven  has  willed,  we  die, 

Nor  even  the  tenderest  heart,  and  next  our  own 
Knows  half  the  reasons  why  we  smile  and  sigh?  "  * 

Meanwhile  he  clung  to  life  to  the  end. 
Father  Neville  writes:  ^ 

"He  knew  how  he  would  be  missed  by 
some,  and  he  felt  for  them;  and  there  were 
objects  and  interests  which  he  held  very 
tenderly  in  mind  with  this  thought  of  them 
—  what  would  happen  in  the  struggle  which 
in  his  forecast  of  the  future  seemed  likely  to 
come?  God's  cause  was  ever  in  his  mind. 
And  as  long  as  he  could  in  any  way  serve  it 
he  desired  to  stay." 


1  Vol.  II.,  p.  354. 

*"The  Christian  Year,"  Twenty-fourth  Simday  after 
Trinity. 

»  Vol.  IL,  p.  536, 


138        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

The  fact  was  that  to  the  great  majority 
of  Roman  Catholics  he  was  not  merely 
uncongenial  —  that  to  their  excessive  dog- 
matism his  tendency  to  minimize  was 
irksome,  and  to  their  imperialism  he 
seemed  too  democratic  —  besides  this, 
many  Anglicans  and  very  many  Roman 
Cathohcs  considered  that  he  was  sub- 
stantially a  sceptic.  Dr.  Fairbairn  ex- 
presses this  estimate:  "He  has  a  deep 
distrust  of  the  intellect;  he  dares  not  trust 
his  own,  for  he  does  not  know  where  it 
might  lead  him,  and  he  will  not  trust  any 
other  man's.  'The  Grammar  of  Assent' 
is  pervaded  by  the  intensest  philosophical 
scepticism."  ^  Such  critics  fail,  I  think, 
to  see  the  difference  between  scepticism 
and  the  ability  to  enter  into  the  mind  of 
the  sceptic  —  to  imagine  him  as  a  concrete 
reality,   an  actual  human  being.    New- 

1  Vol.  II.,  p.  SOS. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  139 

man  himself,  as  we  have  already  noticed, 
had  indeed  declared  that  up  to  the  time  of 
his  conversion,  as  he  was  going  up  to 
Oxford  in  181 7,  he  was  conscious  of  a 
strong  intellectual  tendency  to  scepticism,^ 
and  he  thanked  God  that  He  shielded 
him  morally  from  what  intellectually 
might  easily  have  come  on  him;  —  which 
is  equivalent  to  saying  that  in  early  years 
his  philosophical  position  was  in  this 
respect  like  Kant's.  But  whether  the 
Kantian  position  can  be  properly  termed 
sceptical,  or  not,  at  any  rate  from  the  time 
of  his  conversion  Newman  was  in  this 
respect  a  changed  man:  he  was  not  essen- 
tially a  sceptic;  for  he  held  that  God  was 
the  starting-point  and  stay  of  all  his  think- 
ing, and  he  loved  God  with  his  mind.  2 
Nor  was  he  sceptical  about  the  Church; 


'  Vol.  I,  p.  31. 

*  Vol.  I.,  p.  30;  cp.  Vol.  II.,  p.  265. 


140        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

he  believed  in  the  Church's  divinity. 
But  he  was  keenly  ahve  to  the  human 
element  in  the  Church,  and  frightened 
his  friends  by  the  intellectual  vividness 
and  the  moral  earnestness  with  which  he 
apprehended  this  human  element.  In 
this  regard  his  intellectual  and  moral 
perceptions  were  as  keen  as  was  the  fas- 
tidiousness of  his  palate.  (In  his  Oriel 
days  this  abstemious  man  had  been 
selected  to  taste  the  wines  for  the  college 
cellar.)  He  was  aware  of  the  physical  and 
psychological  and  subconscious  forces  that 
are  at  work  in  the  human  mind.  He  knew 
that  the  best  of  logic  is  ineffective  when 
the  intellectual  instrument  of  the  indivis- 
ible man  is  out  of  working  order.  Around 
God  as  the  central  Object,  his  active  mind 
was  always  on  the  move;  but,  according 
to  his  own  attestation  near  the  end  of  his 
life,  from  the  moment  of  his  conversion  he 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  141 

never  once  had  been  sceptical  about 
God's  reality,  nor  about  his  own  abso- 
lute relation  to  God,  as  of  person  to  Per- 
son. Surely  Newman,  rather  than  any 
other  man,  is  the  proper  judge  as  to 
whether  this  is  the  true  account  of  him- 
self. "For  a  man's  mind  is  sometime 
wont  to  tell  him  more  than  seven  watch- 
men, that  sit  above  in  a  high  tower."  ^ 
Newman's  sensitive,  elastic,  nimble  mind 
moved  too  fast  and  too  far  for  others  to 
keep  up  with  him:  his  utterances,  while 
not  indicative  of  scepticism  on  his  part, 
did  doubtless  appear  sceptical  to  others; 
for  if  others  had  said  what  he  said, 
they  would  have  been  sceptics;  but  New- 
man's own  faith  was  firm.  He  loved 
God  with  all  his  mind  and  heart  and 
soul  and  strength.  He  was  conscious  of 
shortcomings    and    infirmities,    and    did 

^  Ecclus.  xxxvii.  14. 


142        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

not  try  to  hide  them;  but  we  must  accept 
his  own  account  of  himself  on  the  score  of 
scepticism.  The  bottom  quahty  of  New- 
man's thought,  and  therefore  of  his  style 
(for  in  his  case  the  style  is  the  man),  was 
that  in  theology  he  would  not  abandon 
the  scientific  method  upon  an  ethical 
impulse.  He  wanted,  like  Wordsworth's 
cloud,  to  "move  altogether  if  he  moved 
at  all."  Even  in  his  abstract  thinking  he 
insisted  upon  holding  on  to  both  the  sci- 
entific and  the  ethical  impulse;  so  that  he 
appeared  sceptical  to  those  who  sacri- 
ficed the  scientific  to  the  ethical.  He 
dreaded  the  ecclesiastical  narrowness  that 
will  not  face  the  facts  of  science  and  of 
modern  civilization.  "There  is,"  he  wrote 
to  Sir  Frederick  Rogers,  "in  particular 
quarters  a  narrowness  which  is  not  of 
God."  ^    Newman's  point  of  view  was,  first, 

1  Vol.  I.,  p.  439- 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  143 

that  cold  reason  is  by  no  means  always 
on  the  side  of  science,  any  more  than 
mysticism  is  always  absent  from  scientific 
thinking;  and  secondly,  that  some  of  the 
primary  perceptions  and  movements  of 
the  intellect  are  quite  as  authoritative 
acts  as  are  some  of  our  ethical  decisions. 
Here  was  the  point  of  Newman's  conver- 
sion in  his  seventeenth  year;  and  his 
whole  subsequent  course  and  influence 
depended  on  it.  Newman  was  deter- 
mined to  pursue  a  rational  method  in 
pursuit  of  rehgious  ideals.  In  his  the- 
ology, faith  was  not  a  renunciation  of 
reason:  authority  and  inquiry  were  rec- 
oncilable; whereas,  to  many,  faith  and 
reason  are  not  reconcilable:  credo  quia 
impossible;  and  to  such  persons  Newman 
appeared  to  be  a  sceptic.  But  to  his 
own  Master  he  standeth  or  falleth;  and 
we,  his  fellows  on  the  transcendental  way, 


144        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

must,  in  this  respect,  take  him   at   his 
word. 

An  excellent  illustration  of  Newman's 
method  is  furnished  by  his  determination 
to  minimize  the  Pope's  Infallibility;  and 
strangely  enough  this  is  the  one  instance 
in  his  whole  career  where  he  succeeded  in 
his  immediate  object  of  endeavor;  and  the 
Cardinal's  hat  was  his  reward  for  this, 
since  Leo  XIII.,  unlike  his  successor,  the 
present  Pope,  sympathized  with  New- 
man's attitude  as  a  minimizer.  To  begin 
with,  Newman  did  not  want  the  dogma  of 
InfalHbiUty  to  be  promulgated  by  a  Coun- 
cil. He  wanted  to  let  well  alone.  He 
would  allow  to  the  Pope  Infallibihty  as 
an  abstraction;  which  would  be  about 
equivalent  to  saying  that  while  the  Pope's 
private  judgment  was  doubtless  better 
than  his  own,  he  wished  the  Pope  to  be 
enough  of  a  gentleman  to  keep  his  private 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  145 

judgment  pretty  much  to  himself.  If,  in 
deference  to  the  desires  of  other  Roman 
Cathohcs,  Newman  were  called  to  go  fur- 
ther than  this,  and  to  admit  the  Pope's 
Infalhbility  as  an  abstract  proposition 
generally  binding  on  the  faithful,  in  that 
case  Newman,  and  every  other  intelli- 
gent Roman  Catholic,  must  be  allowed 
to  interpret  and  apply  the  proposition 
after  his  own  fashion;  and  if  there  must 
be  a  conciliar  proclamation  of  the  propo- 
sition, Newman  was  bound  to  be  allowed 
to  apply  to  it  a  minimizing  interpretation 
and  to  get  general  acceptance  for  his 
minimizing.  In  practical  application  it 
was  to  be  explained  away.  In  this  en- 
deavor Newman  was,  for  the  time  being, 
successful.  Manning  and  Ward  were 
against  him,  and,  in  this  case,  Manning 
for  the  nonce  joined  hands  with  the 
Jesuits.    Thus  Newman  was  in  England 


146        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

confronted  with  what  he  called,  "an  inso- 
lent and  aggressive  faction."  ^  Further- 
more, the  Roman  Catholic  schools  of 
Belgium,  Holland,  France,  and  Italy, 
under  the  direction  of  the  religious  orders, 

—  true  Ultramontanes  almost  all  of  them 

—  were  against  Newman.  Nevertheless, 
he  won  out.  Canon  Scot't  Holland,  in 
The  Commonwealth,  has  thus  described  the 
situation :  ^ 

"And  there  is  the  Holy  Father  himself, 
most  lovable  of  men,  but  absolutely  ignorant 
what  the  problem  is  which  his  own  infalli- 
bility is  required  to  solve;  utterly  ignorant 
of  all  the  intellectual  anxieties  which  are 
sweeping  over  the  minds  of  the  laity  as  New- 
man knows  them;  utterly  unaware  that  there 
are  such  anxieties;  utterly  out  of  touch  with 
the  very  situation  which  cries  aloud  for  his 
infallible  authority  to  act.    He  smiles  and 


1  Vol.  II.,  p.  289. 

*  The  Commonwealth  for  March,  1912,  pp.  82-83. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  147 

jokes  his  way  along,  and  carries  the  Council 
with  him  to  declare  his  infallibility,  by  sheer 
delight  in  his  good-humored  puns.  And  yet 
you  love  him  all  the  time,  and  are  amused 
to  find  that  in  the  end  he  has  passed  the 
definition  of  his  own  infalHbility  in  the  con- 
trary sense  to  the  one  which  he  himself 
intended.  For  certainly  it  has  come  out  that 
the  infallibility  proclaimed  is  to  be  under- 
stood, not  in  the  sense  of  the  party  who  car- 
ried it,  but  in  the  sense  of  those  minimizers 
whom  they  decried;  so  that  instead  of  Mr. 
W.  G.  Ward's  vision  of  a  Papal  Bull  arriving 
every  morning  for  your  breakfast  with  The 
Times  and  toast,  there  has  not  been  really 
one  single  infallible  utterance  in  the  forty 
years  that  have  followed  the  proclamation." 

Thus  Newman  and  Lord  Acton  and 
Dupanloup  and  Montalembert  and  La- 
cordaire,  and  the  Liberal  Catholics  gen- 
erally, prevailed  at  last  over  Manning 
and  Ward  and  Louis  Veuillot  and  the 
Ultramontanes,  to  whose  confusion  New- 


148       ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

man  was  presented  with  the  hat  of  a 
Cardinal,  by  way  of  stopping  people 
from  saying  that  "the  Pope  snubbed 
him."  1 

But  in  all  this  Newman  was  Newman 
still,  reacting  as  before  against  his  sur- 
roundings and  insisting  on  exercising  his 
own  indomitable  individuality.  In  the 
old  Tractarian  days  Newman  had  com- 
plained that  the  Bishops  of  the  Church 
of  England  in  matters  of  Christian  dogma 
uttered  no  certain  sound:  now  he  com- 
plained that  the  universal  Bishop  of  Chris- 
tendom was  too  certain  in  his  utterances. 
In  his  Roman  Catholic  surroundings  New- 
man wanted  greater  freedom  of  utterance 
and  interpretation  for  himself;  and  for 
the  moment  his  efforts  as  a  minimizer 
were  crowned  with  Pope  Leo's  approval. 
But  it  was  only  for  a  little  while.     How 

1  Vol.  II.,  p.  445. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  149 

completely  Newman  failed  in  persuad- 
ing the  Roman  Catholic  communion  to 
stand  for  what  he  stood  for,  is  sufficiently 
disclosed  by  Pope  Pius  X.'s  Encyclical  of 
Feb.  II,  1906,  where  these  words  occur: 
"As  for  the  multitude,  their  only  duty  is 
to  let  themselves  be  led,  and  to  follow 
their  Shepherd  as  a  docile  herd." 

Ill 

It  has  often  been  remarked  that  after 
he  joined  the  Roman  Catholic  Church, 
Newman  passed,  intellectually,  under  an 
eclipse.  This  is  hardly  exact,  for  his 
"Difficulties  of  Anglicans,"  "Apologia," 
and  "Grammar  of  Assent"  are  as  bril- 
liant, and  in  some  respects  as  valuable, 
as  any  of  his  productions;  his  "Dream  of 
Gerontius"  is  a  poem  of  fine  imagination 
and  great  spiritual  power;  and  his  "Essay 
on  the  Development  of  Christian  Doc- 


I50        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

trine"  was  epoch-making,  if  only  because 
it  was  the  precursor  of  Modernism,  and 
profoundly  influenced  such  men  as  Loisy 
and  Father  Tyrrell.  But,  with  these 
exceptions,  there  does  seem  to  be  a  steady 
decline  in  the  quality  of  his  productions, 
and  the  sermons  published  in  his  Roman 
Catholic  days  do  not,  for  the  most  part, 
hold  their  own  in  comparison  with  the 
"Parochial"  and  the  "University"  ser- 
mons of  his  Anglican  ministry.  Perhaps 
one  reason  for  this  decline  was  the  fact 
that  this  period  of  his  Hfe  was  shrouded  in 
despondency.  His  portraits  at  this  time 
are  likenesses  of  a  very  unhappy  man,  and 
he  had  too  much  of  the  sensitive,  artistic 
temperament  to  do  justice  to  his  natural 
talents  under  such  conditions. 

Meanwhile  he  presents  to  us  an  aspect 
which  is  perhaps  more  difficult  to  under- 
stand and  analyze  than  any  other  of  his 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  151 

many  sides.  Who  that  has  appreciated 
the  transparency  of  Newman's  soul  and 
the  force  of  his  intellect  can  follow  with 
aught  else  than  astonishment,  during  his 
later  Roman  Catholic  period,  his  attitude 
in  worship?  We  see  him  now  passing 
into  the  Roman  Catholic  atmosphere  of 
devotion,  and  here,  as  always,  he  is  pecul- 
iar to  himself.  But  what  an  extraordi- 
nary combination  of  elements  and  of 
points  of  view  does  he  now  present  to  us! 
The  very  sincerity  of  the  man,  and  his 
rare  ability  to  express  the  workings  of  his 
soul,  render  him  more  than  ever  elusive. 
Yet  if  we  examine  ourselves  before  we 
examine  him,  we  shall  recognize  that 
even  here  we  can  and  must  go  with  him 
a  certain  distance:  that  at  least  there  is  a 
certain  paralleHsm  between  what  we  find 
him  doing  and  what  we  do  in  worship. 
For,  though  we  Protestants  are  prone  to 


152        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

forget  it,  there  is,  and  always  has  been, 
and  always  must  be,  a  measure  of  accom- 
modation in  the  worship  of  all  mankind. 
Before  we  charge  Newman  with  being 
either  intellectually,  or  else  morally,  im- 
possible and  inconsistent  —  before  we 
assert  that  in  his  words  and  acts  of  devo- 
tion he  is  untrue  to  his  own  professed 
intellectual  tenets,  and  to  the  moods  of 
his  abstract  argumentation,  —  we  Prot- 
estants must  first  consider  carefully  our 
own  attitude  and  expressions  when  we 
pass  from  religious  ratiocination  to  wor- 
ship, whether  public  or  private.  Is  there 
not  accommodation  in  the  worship  of  the 
most  determined  and  self-repressed  of 
Protestants?  Is  it  not  true  of  all  men's 
words  and  acts  of  devotion  that  "these 
things  are  an  allegory,"  "figures  of  the 
true"?  "that  now  we  see  as  in  a  mirror, 
darkly"?    Both  in  Roman  Catholic  and 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  153 

in  Protestant  worship  men  have  to  accom- 
modate themselves,  first,  to  the  forms  and 
symbols  and  expressions  of  the  past:  we 
enter  into  the  worship  of  our  forefathers. 
Furthermore,  from  youth  to  age  our  wor- 
ship is  a  continuous  process  of  accommo- 
dation of  our  former  selves  to  our  present 
selves:  the  meaning  to  us  of  our  forms  of 
Divine  Service  varies  with  our  years,  and 
with  our  experience  of  God  and  of  human 
life:  each  mature  individual  has  to  adapt 
himself,  as  he  now  is,  to  himself  as  he  has 
been:  he  puts  a  new  significance  into  the 
old  acts  and  words;  and  even  in  full 
maturity  he  still,  like  his  children  who 
worship  at  his  side,  is  dealing  with  sym- 
bols of  the  true,  lifting  up  his  heart  unto 
the  Lord.  Again,  we  must  accommodate 
ourselves  to  our  neighbors:  educated  and 
uneducated,  prince  and  pauper,  in  com- 
mon worship  must  sing  the  same  hymns, 


154        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

say  the  same  prayers,  perform  the  same 
acts.  In  this  matter  of  comprehensive 
flexibility  some  good  Protestants  feel 
hardly  less  keenly  than  Newman  the  chilly 
rigidity  of  parts  of  the  EngHsh  Prayer 
Book  —  the  remoteness  of  some  of  our 
Prayer  Book  services  from  the  masses  of 
the  people.  It  is  by  no  means  impossible 
for  us  to  understand  Newman  in  his  pref- 
erence for  the  warmth  and  promiscuous- 
ness  of  the  service  of  a  great  Roman  Cath- 
oHc  cathedral.  When  he  first  left  the 
Church  of  England  he  thus  described  to 
Henry  Wilberforce  his  impression  of  the 
worship  in  St.  Peter's,  Rome :  ^ 

*'I  doubt  if  you  will  understand  me,  but 
a  Catholic  cathedral  is  a  sort  of  world,  every- 
one going  about  his  own  business,  but  that 
business  a  religious  one;  groups  of  worship- 
pers,  and   solitary   ones  —  kneeling,   stand- 


^  Vol.  I.,  pp.  140-141. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  155 

ing  —  some  at  shrines,  some  at  altars  — 
hearing  Mass  and  communicating,  currents 
of  worshippers  intercepting  and  passing  by- 
each  other  —  altar  after  altar  lit  up  for 
worship,  like  stars  in  the  firmament  —  or 
the  bell  giving  notice  of  what  is  going  on  in 
parts  you  do  not  see,  and  all  the  while  the 
canons  in  the  choir  going  through  matins 
and  lauds,  and  at  the  end  of  it  the  incense 
rolling  up  from  the  high  altar,  and  all  this  in 
one  of  the  most  wonderful  buildings  in  the 
world  and  every  day  —  lastly,  all  of  this  with- 
out any  show  or  effort  —  but  what  everyone 
is  used  to  —  everyone  at  his  own  work,  and 
leaving  everyone  else  to  his.  .  .  .  It  is  always 
a  refreshment  to  the  mind,  and  elevates  it, 
to  enter  a  church  such  as  St.  FideHs.  It 
has  such  a  sweet,  smiHng,  open  countenance 
—  and  the  altar  is  so  gracious  and  winning, 
standing  out  for  all  to  see,  and  to  approach. 
The  tall  polished  marble  columns,  the  marble 
rails,  the  marble  floor,  the  bright  pictures, 
all  speak  the  same  language.  And  a  light 
dome  crowns  the  whole.  Perhaps  I  do  but 
follow  the  way  of  elderly  persons,  who  have 
seen  enough  that  is  sad  [in]  life  to  be  able  to 


156        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

dispense  with  officious,  intentional  sadness 
—  and  as  the  young  prefer  autumn  and  the 
old  spring,  the  young  tragedy  and  the  old 
comedy,  so  in  the  ceremonial  of  religion, 
younger  men  have  my  leave  to  prefer  Gothic, 
if  they  will  but  tolerate  me  in  my  weakness, 
which  requires  the  ItaHan.  It  is  so  soothing 
and  pleasant,  after  the  hot  streets,  to  go  into 
these  delicate  yet  rich  interiors,  which  are 
like  the  bowers  of  paradise  or  an  angel's 
chamber.  We  found  the  same  in  a  different 
way  in  Paris.  It  was  oppressively  hot,  and 
we  wandered  through  the  narrow  streets  in 
the  evening,  seeking  out  the  Jesuits'  house. 
When  we  found  it,  the  Superior  was  out,  and 
we  were  ushered  in,  as  into  a  drawing-room, 
into  so  green  and  beautiful  a  garden,  with 
refreshing  trees  on  the  lawn,  and  quiet  fig- 
ures stealing  along  the  walks  saying  their 
office.  We  entered  a  trellised  walk  of  vines 
and  seated  ourselves  on  a  stone  bench  which 
lay  on  the  ground." 

Undoubtedly   in    Protestant    congrega- 
tions there  are  proportionately  a  larger 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  157 

number  of  educated  people  than  in  most 
Roman  Catholic  congregations;  and  the 
average  Teutonic  and  Anglo-Saxon  mind 
uses  religious  symbols  more  sparingly  and 
with  a  greater  faculty  of  abstraction 
than,  for  example,  the  average  Italian;  un- 
doubtedly, furthermore,  the  habit  of  the 
more  intellectual  Italians  to  worship  con- 
stantly with  persons  less  educated  and 
more  childish  than  themselves  induces 
even  the  more  intellectual  to  consent  to 
forms  of  worship  which  they  themselves 
have  intellectually  outgrown,  until  fi- 
nally their  minds  do  not,  as  otherwise  they 
might,  rebel  against  such  forms.  A  sim- 
ilar result  may  be  seen  among  Protes- 
tants who  worship  in  company  with  their 
children,  in  contrast  to  Protestants  who 
do  not  even  try  to  adjust  themselves 
to  their  children  in  mind  and  soul.  But 
a   candid   Protestant   must   admit   that, 


158        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

however  simple  and  undemonstrative  his 
forms  of  pubHc  worship  may  be,  if  they 
are  to  appeal  to  and  include  the  people 
generally,  they  must  be  characterized  by 
comprehensive  flexibility  and  a  generous 
use  of  symbols,  and  of  objects  to  assist 
devotion  and  guide  the  eye  and  fire  the 
imagination,  —  in  short,  to  exercise  not 
merely  the  mind  but  the  body  also,  and 
to  relieve  the  soul.  At  bottom  we  are 
touching  here  the  whole  subject  of  idol- 
atry; and  any  Protestant  who  has  trav- 
elled in  the  Orient,  or  conversed  with 
missionaries,  or  even  visited  social  settle- 
ments in  our  own  city  slums,  sooner  or 
later  comes  to  the  conclusion  that  he  must 
revise  his  definition  of  the  term  idolatry. 
Nay,  before  we  have  done  with  this  deep, 
difficult  question,  many  of  us  will  be 
asking  ourselves  whether  there  are  not 
many  idols  in  Protestant  homes,  and  in 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  159 

Protestant  minds  that  never  bow  down 
in  prayer  to  wood  or  stone.  Certainly 
Bacon  decided  that  there  are.  On  the 
other  hand,  one  of  our  ablest  American 
professors,  who  has  made  a  study  of 
childhood,  declares  his  conviction  that 
many  savages,  both  children  and  adults, 
are  not  really  as  idolatrous  as  we  are 
prone  to  suppose.  In  other  words,  edu- 
cation and  the  habit  of  dealing  with 
intellectual  theories  and  spiritual  abstrac- 
tions do  not  necessarily  remove  from  even 
the  most  enlightened  of  us  the  tempta- 
tion to  worship  false  gods;  and  it  was 
not  for  naught  that  an  Old  Testament 
prophet  warned  his  people  against  "setting 
up  idols  in  their  heart."  Especially  in 
these  days,  when  the  widespread  desire 
for  Christian  Unity  is  drawing  the  various 
denominations  of  Christians  nearer  to 
each  other  in  faith  and  worship,  must  not 


i6o        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

the  absolute  necessity  of  revising  our 
notions  as  to  what  will  be  required  of  us 
in  this  matter  of  accommodation  in  wor- 
ship, be  more  than  ever  in  our  minds? 

Recognizing,  therefore,  the  complex- 
ity of  this  whole  subject,  when  treated 
squarely  and  thoroughly,  we  shall  be 
slow  to  accuse  Newman  of  insincerity 
when  he  worships  as  ordinary  Roman 
Catholics  do,  and  even  when  he  exer- 
cises his  amazing  ability  to  argue  in 
their  defence.  Yet,  no  matter  what  par- 
allelism there  be  between  what  Newman 
did  and  what  we  all  do  —  mentally  and 
spiritually,  no  less  than  by  bodily  signs 
and  acts  —  in  worship,  nevertheless  we 
cannot  deny  that  before  long  Newman 
becomes  to  us  "a  lost  leader."  There  are 
obscure  and  subconscious  psychological 
processes  through  which  Newman  passes 
that  we  do  not  partake  of;  and  his  Intel- 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  i6i 

lect,  formerly  so  clear,  is  overcast  with 
superstition.  Nor  can  we  fail  to  notice 
that  even  now,  in  the  midst  of  his  recently 
adopted  Roman  Catholic  environment, 
Newman  is  still  Newman  —  still  going 
his  own  way,  still  reacting  and  asserting 
his  individuality.  On  the  one  hand,  he 
insists  on  exercising  his  Anglo-Saxon  tem- 
perament —  the  habits  of  non-Latin  men- 
tality. Alluding  to  Faber  and  Ward  and 
other  recent  and  rabid  converts  to  Rome, 
he  writes:  ^  "They  are  in  no  sense  spokes- 
men for  EngHsh  Catholics,  and  they  must 
not  stand  in  the  place  of  those  who  have 
a  real  title  to  such  an  office."  When  Dr. 
Pusey  in  his  Eirenicon  quoted  from 
Roman  CathoHc  manuals  many  extreme 
expressions  of  devotion  to  the  Blessed 
Virgin  Mary  and  the  Saints,  Newman 
repHed : 

1  Vol.  II.,  p.  104. 


i62        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

"Sentiments  such  as  these  I  freely  surren- 
der to  your  animadversion;  I  never  knew  of 
them  till  I  read  your  book,  nor,  as  I  think, 
do  the  vast  majority  of  English  Catholics 
know  them.  They  seem  to  me  Hke  a  bad 
dream."  ^  ''I  prefer  English  habits  of  be- 
hef  and  devotion  to  foreign,  for  the  same 
causes,  and  by  the  same  right,  which  justifies 
foreigners  in  preferring  their  own."  ^  "In 
England  Catholics  pray  before  images,  not  to 
them.  I  wonder  whether  as  many  as  a  dozen 
pray  to  them,  but  they  will  be  the  best  Cath- 
ohcs,  not  ordinary  ones.  The  truth  is,  that 
sort  of  affectionate  fervor  which  leads  one  to 
confuse  an  object  with  its  representation  is 
skin-deep  in  the  South  and  argues  nothing 
for  a  worshipper's  faith,  hope,  and  charity, 
whereas  in  a  Northern  race,  like  ours,  with 
whom  ardent  devotional  feehng  is  not  com- 
mon, it  may  be  the  mark  of  great  spirituality. 
As  to  the  nature  of  the  feeling  itself,  and  its 
absolute  incongruity  with  any  intellectual 
intention  of  addressing  the  image  as  an  im- 
age, I  think  it  is  not  difficult  for  any  one  with 

» Vol.  II.,  p.  io6.  2  Vol.  II.,  p.  no. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  163 

an  ordinary  human  heart  to  understand  it. 
Do  we  not  love  the  picture  which  we  may 
have  of  friends  departed?  Will  not  a  hus- 
band wear  in  his  bosom  and  kiss  the  minia- 
ture of  his  wife?  Cannot  you  fancy  a  man 
addressing  himself  to  it,  as  if  it  were  the 
reality?  Think  of  Cowper's  Hnes  on  his 
Mother's  picture.  'Those  lips  are  thine,'  he 
says,  '  thy  own  sweet  smile  I  see '  —  and  then 
'Fancy  shall  steep  me  in  Elysian  reverie,  a 
momentary  dream  that  thou  art  She  J  And  then 
he  goes  on  to  the  picture, '  My  Mother,'  etc."  ^ 

On  the  other  hand,  how  can  a  man 
like  Newman,  who  still  retains  so  much 
of  the  Anglo-Saxon  mentality,  and  who 
was  once  indeed  a  Protestant  —  how  can 
he  —  though  he  has  become  a  Roman- 
ist and  embraced  Mariolatry  and  the 
worship  of  saints  —  how  can  he  possibly 
be  jocose  about  it,  and,  even  when  he 
is  at  his  prayers  to  saints,  indulge  in 
persiflage?    If  we  know  ourselves  at  all, 

1  Vol.  I.,  p  652. 


i64        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

in  case  we  ever  broke  into  such  expres- 
sions as  the  following,  it  would  mean  that 
our  prayers  to  saints  were  not  real  prayers. 
But  Newman  is  so  individual,  and  tem- 
peramentally so  sincere,  that  he  is,  towards 
his  patron  saint,  very  much  as  we,  in  our 
years  of  discretion,  are  towards  our 
earthly  parents,  whom  we  still  respect  and 
lean  on,  but  at  the  same  time  criticise 
and  now  and  then  J&nd  fault  with.  In  so 
great  and  wise  and  saintly  a  man  as 
Frangois  de  Sales  there  was  a  Httle  of 
this,  even  in  his  attitude  toward  our 
Heavenly  Father;  for  did  he  not,  in  all 
seriousness,  write  to  one  of  his  penitents, 
"If  God  tires  you,  tell  Him  that  He  tires 
you"?  But  toward  the  Virgin  Mary  and 
St.  Philip,  his  patron  saint,  Newman 
goes  much  farther  than  that. 
He  writes  to  Sister  Imelda :  ^ 


1  Vol.  I.,  pp.  288-289. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  165 

"I  smiled  at  the  cleverness  mth  which 
you  are  attempting  to  get  up  a  miraculous 
Image  in  England.  Now  as  to  your  proposal, 
I  have  this  difficulty,  that  it  is  taxing  our 
Blessed  Lady  unfairly  —  not  her  power,  but 
her  willingness.  .  .  .  Now  what  right  have 
I,  for  the  sake  of  my  private  ends,  to  put  your 
Image  on  trial?  It  has  done  everything  for 
you,  —  because  you  have  asked  what  you 
ought  to  ask.  Now  you  wish  me  to  ask  a 
very  hard  thing,  and  that  (in  a  way)  selfishly, 
and  you  make  me  say  to  our  Lady,  'Do  it, 
under  pain  of  your  Image  losing  its  repute.' 
...  It  is  just  possible,  and  rather  more 
than  possible,  that  it  is  His  blessed  will  that 
I  should  suffer  —  and  though  I  don't  think  so 
quite  so  much  as  I  did,  yet  somehow  at  first 
sight  I  do  not  Hke  to  be  unkind,  if  I  may  use 
such  a  word,  to  your  Image.  ...  I  will  not 
get  you  into  any  more  scrapes  with  Rever- 
end Mother.  I  gladly  avail  myself  of  her 
offer  —  and  promise  that  if  her  Madonna 
gains  my  acquittal  I  will  gladly  come  to 
Clifton,  preach  a  sermon  in  her  honor,  and, 
if  it  is  consistent  with  your  rules,  carry  her 
in  procession.  .  .  .    Thank  you  with  all  my 


1 66        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

heart  for  what  you  are  so  kindly  intending  to 
gain  for  me.  Thank  you  also  for  the  reproof 
you  have  administered  to  me.  I  know  well 
I  am  an  unbelieving  old  beast ;  and  so  perhaps 
in  this  instance.  Recollect,  however,  dear 
Reverend  Mother,  that  our  House  in  Bir- 
mingham is  erected  under  the  Invocation  of 
the  Immaculate  Mother  of  God,  as  beseems 
an  Oratory  of  St.  Philip  —  and  is  dedicated 
to  her  forever,  and  that  you  will  not  please 
her  by  abusing  /zm." 

As  to  St.  Philip  Neri,  and  his  short- 
comings as  a  patron  saint,  this  is  how 
Newman  expresses  himself,  not  in  a  let- 
ter —  as  above  about  the  Virgin  Mary  — 
but  in  a  prayer  to  God  Himself:  ^ 

"0  my  God,  in  Thy  sight,  I  confess  and 
bewail  my  extreme  weakness  in  distrusting, 
if  not  Thee,  at  least  Thy  own  servants  and 
representatives,  when  things  do  not  turn  out 
as  I  would  have  them,  or  expected!  Thou 
hast  given  me  St.  Philip,  that  great  creation 
of  Thy  grace,  for  my  master  and  patron  — 

2  Vol.  II.,  p.  365. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  167 

and  I  have  committed  myself  to  him  —  and 
he  has  done  very  great  things  for  me,  and 
has  in  many  ways  fulfilled  toward  me  all 
that  I  can  fairly  reckon  he  had  promised. 
But,  because  in  some  things  he  has  disap- 
pointed me,  and  delayed,  I  have  got  impa- 
tient; and  have  served  him,  though  without 
conscious  disloyalty,  yet  with  peevishness 
and  coldness.  O  my  dear  Lord,  give  me  a 
generous  faith  in  Thee  and  in  Thy  servants!" 

That  is  how  he  expressed  himself  in 
actual  prayer  to  God  concerning  St. 
Philip;  and  in  another  place  we  have  in 
one  of  Newman's  letters  to  Father  St. 
John,  an  instance  of  how  Newman  would 
remonstrate  with  St.  Philip  himself:  ^ 

"The  case  is  different  when  I  think  of  St. 
Phihp;  then  I  argue  thus:  There  is  just  one 
virtue  which  he  asks  for,  detachment,  which 
at  the  same  time  he  prevents  me  having. 
There  is  just  one  thing  which  hinders  me 
being  detached,  and  that  is,  that  I  have  made 

1  Vol.  II.,  pp.  345-346- 


1 68        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

myself  his  servant.  What  wish  have  I  for 
life,  or  for  success  of  any  kind,  except  so  far 
as  and  because  I  have  this  his  congregation 
on  my  hands?  He  it  is  who  has  implicated 
me  in  the  world,  in  a  way  in  which  I  never 
was  before,  or  at  least  never  since  my  mother 
died  and  my  sisters  married.  For  St.  Philip's 
sake  I  have  given  up  my  liberty,  and  have, 
as  far  as  the  temptation  and  trial  of  anxiety 
goes,  become  as  secular  almost  as  if  I  had 
married.  The  one  thing  I  ask  of  him  is  to 
shield  me  from  the  extreme  force  of  this 
trial;  and  the  only  explanation  I  can  suggest 
to  myself  why  he  does  not  do  so  is  that  I 
have  in  some  way  or  other  greatly  offended 
him.  And,  when  I  cry  out  to  you,  it  is  not 
in  complaint,  but  as  signifying  inarticulately 
feelings  which  are  too  deep  for  words.  Please 
God,  and  I  hope  not  from  pride,  I  will  be 
faithful  to  St.  Philip,  and  then  God  will  re- 
ward me,  though  St.  PhiHp  does  not.  And 
I  will  therefore  bottle  up  my  thoughts  and 
fancy  St.  Philip  saying  to  me  what  a  French 
conducteur  once  did,  when  I  was  looking 
after  the  safety  of  my  luggage.  'It  is  my 
business,  not  yours.'" 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  169 

When  we  read  such  utterances  as 
these  and  remember  that  they  came  from 
a  mature  man  of  great  intellect  and  high 
spirituality  —  from  a  man,  too,  who  was 
born  and  bred  an  Anglican,  and  in  his 
early  ministry  was  wont  to  make  much  of 
the  reticence  and  reserve  of  our  Lord 
and  of  the  whole  New  Testament  in  all 
such  matters  —  it  almost  seems  as  if  New- 
man, in  his  Roman  CathoHc  days,  got  fi- 
nally into  much  the  same  state  of  mind  as 
Count  von  Hoensbroech  describes  when 
telling  of  his  boyhood  in  his  Junker 
home  in  Germany,  where  he  and  his 
playfellows  entered  with  gusto  into  the 
"Mass-game":  1 

"We  boys  were  very  early  taught  to  'min- 
ister' at  the  daily  Mass  in  our  chapel.  .  .  . 
Only  those  who  know  the  theatrical  nature 

^"Fourteen  Years  a  Jesuit,"  by  Count  von  Hoens- 
broech. Vol.  I.,  pp.  22-23.  Translation  by  Alice  Zim- 
mem.     Cassell  &  Co.,  New  York,  1911. 


170        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

of  the  ceremony,  with  aU  its  minutiae,  its 
liturgical  utensils  and  vestments,  its  prayers, 
recited  now  loudly,  now  in  undertones,  its 
gleam  of  tapers  and  ringing  of  bells,  its  mys- 
tical culmination  in  the  transformation  of 
bread  and  wine  into  the  body  and  blood  of 
Christ,  can  realize  the  impression  it  makes 
on  the  minds  of  children  who  actually  par- 
ticipate in  the  celebration.  But  even  this 
participation  in  the  Mass  did  not  suffice  for 
my  mother.  One  Christmas  we  received  as 
a  present  a  'Mass-game,'  consisting  of  all  the 
objects  required  for  the  celebration  —  an 
altar,  vestments,  missal,  and  all  the  uten- 
sils —  chalice,  wine  and  water  cans,  candle- 
sticks and  bell,  which  enabled  us  children 
to  celebrate  the  Mass  in  play,  and  occasion- 
ally to  add  to  it  a  sermon.  Even  our  sisters 
put  on  the  vestments,  and,  contrary  to  aU 
discipline  and  dogma,  said  Mass  and  preached, 
in  spite  of  the  exhortation  Mulier  taceat  in 
ecclesia.  If  other  children  came  to  visit  us, 
we  entertained  them  with  a  solemn  service, 
and  choral  High  Mass,  when  our  juvenile 
vivacity  often  led  to  drastic  scenes  between 
the  officiating  priests  and  the  faithtful  con- 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  171 

gregation.  As  this  'Mass-game'  was  not 
specially  made  for  us,  but  was  to  be  had 
by  purchasing,  it  is  probable  that  it  is  still 
played  in  many  an  ultramontane  household. 
Conceive  of  it:  the  very  culmination  of  the 
Catholic  religion,  around  which,  in  the  words 
of  theologians,  all  else  revolves  '  as  around  the 
sun,'  the  fearful  mystery  (tremendum  mys- 
terium),  at  whose  celebration  'worshipping 
angels  attend,'  is  turned  into  a  children's 
game!" 

In  a  letter  to  the  Duke  of  Norfolk,^ 
Newman  remarks,  ''The  Rock  of  St. 
Peter  on  its  smnmit  enjoys  a  pure  and 
serene  atmosphere,  but  there  is  a  great 
deal  of  Roman  malaria  at  the  foot  of  it." 
Had  not  the  malaria  got  hold  of  Newman 
when  he  wrote  such  passages  as  those 
above  quoted,  or  as  the  following  to  Dr. 
Pusey?  Thuik  of  it,  in  a  letter  to  Dr. 
Pusey,  whom,  in  the  "Apologia,"  he 
described  as  6  Meya?! 

^  Vol.  II.,  p.  404. 


172        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

"So  far  concerning  the  Blessed  Virgin.^ 
And  now,  when  I  could  wish  to  proceed, 
she  seems  to  stop  all  controversy,  for 
the  Feast  of  her  Immaculate  Conception  is 
upon  us.  .  .  .  May  that  bright  and  gentle 
Lady  overcome  you  with  her  sweetness.''^ 

Does  it  not  —  to  use  Newman's  own 
remark  to  Pusey  about  Images  and  some 
Romanist  expressions  concerning  the  Saints 
and  Mariolatry  —  does  not  this  phrase 
of  Newman  to  Pusey  seem  "like  a  bad 
dream"?  Truly,  Newman  is  now  quite 
as  much  of  a  distressing  puzzle  to  our- 
selves, as  he  was  in  other  matters  to  his 
Roman  Catholic  associates. 


IV 

We  have,  as  far  as  in  us  lies,  answered 
in  regard  to  Newman  all  save  one  of  the 

1  Vol.  II.,  p.  io8. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  173 

questions  with  which  this  study  began. 
It  remains  to  consider  what  the  ultimate 
secret  was  of  Newman's  influence  over  his 
contemporaries  who  were  reUgiousIy  dis- 
posed. For  such  persons  the  Evangel- 
ical Movement  had  already  accompHshed 
much,  rendering  their  religion  serious  and 
intensely  personal,  and  kindling  a  new 
missionary  zeal.  Newman  himself  owed 
much  to  the  Evangelicals;  but  Newman 
and  the  Tractarians  had  something  else 
to  contribute  to  the  religious  life  of  the 
Church  of  England,  namely,  their  empha- 
sis on  the  note  of  Catholicity;  their  inter- 
est in  ecclesiastical  antiquities;  their  wider 
literary  culture;  and  above  all  their  keener 
apprehension  of  the  common  social  and 
sacramental  Hfe  of  Christians  as  members 
of  the  one  Body  whose  head  is  Christ. 
Dean  Church  bears  emphatic  witness  to 
this  side  of  Newman's  influence,  as  well 


174        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

as  to  the  impression  of  what  sainthood 
signifies,  which  Newman  and  the  other 
authors  of  the  ''Lyra  ApostoHca"  revived 
in  England. 

But  besides  all  this,  Newman  had  a 
different  and  weighty  message  for  all  per- 
sons who  were  rehgiously  disposed,  no 
matter  what  their  ecclesiastical  connection. 
We  have  to  remember  that  for  two  cen- 
turies there  has  been  among  civilized 
mankind  a  noticeable  change  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  certitude;  or  possibly  it 
would  be  more  exact  to  say  that  there  has 
been  a  change  in  men's  idea  of  the  range 
of  human  certitude  and  the  direction  in 
which  our  sense  of  certitude  applies  itself.^ 
For  a  considerable  period  previous  to  New- 
man, and  throughout  his  time,  the  human 
intellect   was  chiefly  engaged,   and   very 


1  Cf.    Richard    Holt    Hutton's    essay   on    "Religious 
Uncertainty." 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  175 

seriously  engaged,  with  the  surface  of  Kfe, 
rather  than  with  the  springs  of  Hfe.  Under 
the  auspices  of  natural  science  a  new  range 
of  wholesome  and  unselfish  interests  had 
been  called  to  man's  attention  in  con- 
nection with  physical  objects;  and  these 
interests  had  a  certain  largeness  and  cath- 
oUcity  and  unmistakable  value,  though 
there  was  hardly  a  vestige  in  them  of  deep 
spirituality.  Although  untainted  by  direct 
moral  danger,  these  interests  manifested 
small  promise  of  spiritual  help.  While 
not,  in  the  conventional  sense,  ''worldly," 
they  were  not  "unworldly."  Or,  to  put 
it  differently,  a  new  world  of  the  super- 
ficial understanding  was  so  occupying 
mankind,  that  they  gave  up  the  quest  of 
the  spirit.  If  God  was  not  denied.  He  was 
not  generally  "in  all  the  thoughts"  of 
such  men.  Hereby  it  followed  that  men 
took   most    of   their    tests    of    certainty 


176        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

from  a  region  which  is  physical  rather 
than  spiritual,  and  meanwhile  a  shadow 
was  cast  over  the  true  spirit  of  man: 
his  spiritual  occupation  was  gone;  and 
he  was  less  and  less  aware,  not  only 
of  religious  certainty  on  his  own  part, 
but  of  the  quality  and  cogency  of  religious 
certitude  in  comparison  with  the  certi- 
tude of  physical  science. 

Now  it  was  Newman's  function  to  re- 
claim spirituality  for  the  human  under- 
standing, and  to  compel  men  to  recognize 
that  there  is  actuahty  in  our  religious 
certitude,  no  less  than  in  other  kinds  of 
certitude.  In  this  regard  those  who  caught 
the  contagion  of  Newman's  personality 
found  —  at  least  in  the  sermons  of  his  Ang- 
lican period  —  the  tone  and  teaching  of 
the  New  Testament  about  certainty  in 
religion  restored  to  them.  During  this 
period  of  his  career  Newman's  tone  was 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  177 

the  tone  of  Jesus  Christ.  Newman  saw 
Christ  vivid  in  the  New  Testament,  and 
he  helped  us  to  see  Him.  He  made  Christ 
a  character  as  real  to  us  as  it  is  super- 
human. The  reasonableness,  the  author- 
ity, the  beauty  and  joy  and  pathos,  and 
the  awful  risks  and  prospects  of  man's 
hidden  religious  life  were  by  Newman 
rendered  once  more  vital  to  many  men 
who,  though  not  ignoble,  had  of  late  been 
occupied  with  the  surfaces  of  things. 
The  Rev.  Mr.  Campbell,  of  London,  in 
a  sermon  to  Presbyterians  in  New  York 
last  winter,  said:  "Ever  since  I  was  a  boy 
I  have  had  the  feeling  that  the  spiritual 
world  is  so  real  to  me  that  I  can  almost 
put  my  fist  into  it."  Newman  had  the 
same  feeling,  and  wherever  he  was  he  made 
multitudes  feel  as  he  did:  they  renewed 
their  hold  on  the  world  behind  the  veil, 
and  the  term  "real"  was  no  longer  a  super- 


178        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

ficial  term  for  them,  with  materiaHstic 
connotation.  Students  of  natural  science 
expressed  themselves  with  less  aversion 
to  the  idea  that  "the  spirit  of  man  is  the 
candle  of  the  Lord,"  and  that  ultimate 
reality  is  not  to  be  confined  in  terms  of 
matter.  Speaking  of  the  lives  of  the 
saints,  Newman  observed:  ^  "The  exhibi- 
tion of  a  person,  his  thoughts,  his  words, 
his  acts,  his  trials,  his  features,  his  begin- 
nings, his  growth,  his  end,  have  a  charm 
to  everyone;  and  where  he  is  a  saint,  they 
have  a  divine  influence  and  persuasion, 
a  power  of  exercising  and  eliciting  the 
latent  elements  of  divine  grace  in  indi- 
vidual readers,  as  no  other  reading  can." 
Newman  himself  exhibited  sainthood  to 
all  who  came  within  his  reach.  Withal, 
as  he  remarked  in  his  sermon  on  "The 
Parting  of  Friends,"  he  had  a  marvellous 

1  Vol.  I.,  p.  207. 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  179 

insight  into  the  workings  of  the  human 
mind  and  will;  he  read  men  to  themselves, 
and  comforted  them  in  the  reading,  and 
brought  to  bear  on  them  his  own  over- 
mastering desire  for  holiness,  without 
which  no  man  shall  see  God.  Like  the 
Psalmist  he  had  the  genius  to  put  in  well- 
pruned  words  the  intuitions  of  the  spirit 
—  the  indefinite,  subtle  sentiments  that 
pierce  the  soul  and  render  it  athirst  for 
God.  As  Richard  Holt  Hutton  observes 
in  his  essay  on  "The  Spiritual  Fatigue  of 
the  World,"  "Christianity  carmot  be 
understood  in  any  degree  without  being 
approached  with  a  certain  passion  both 
of  hope  and  fear.  The  whole  history 
which  led  up  to  it,  the  whole  history  which 
has  flowed  forth  from  it,  has  been  a  his- 
tory of  spiritual  passion,  and  there  is  no 
meaning  in  Christianity  at  all  if  it  be  not 
true  that  divine  passion  is  as  deeply  rooted 


i8o        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

in  the  eternal  spirit  as  infinite  reason  it- 
self." This  is  what  Newman  signified 
when  he  chose  for  his  motto  the  saying  of 
Augustine,  "Heart  speaks  to  heart"  {Cor 
ad  cor  loquitur).  Scott  Holland  alludes  to 
this  when  he  speaks  of  the  "lyrical  cry" 
in  Newman;  and  Father  Ryder  "remem- 
bers hearing  an  eccentric  but  acute  critic, 
with  something  of  Mr.  Swinburne's  turn 
for  grouping  poets,  thus  deliver  himself 
in  our  common  room:  'Under  the  head 
Poets  of  Passion  I  would  put  Lord  Byron, 
Charles  Wesley  and '  —  bowing  to  Father 
Newman  — '  if  I  may  be  allowed  to  say 
so,  your  Reverence.'  We  were  all  very 
much  amused,  but  I  have  often  thought 
since  that  the  criticism  was  almost  as  true 
as  it  was  grotesque." 

Thus  our  study  of  Newman  ends,  as 
it  began,  with  the  settled  impression  that 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  i8i 

Newman's  own  intimate  description  of 
himself  to  Sister  Maria  Pia  was  accurate: 
"Like  St.  Gregory  Nazianzen,  I  like  going 
on  my  own  way."  And  the  clue  to  his 
whole  strange  course  was,  in  large  meas- 
ure, his  native  independence  coupled  with 
his  artistic  temperament.  He  was  noble 
and  disinterested,  and  he  worked  for 
love;  but  he  wanted  recognition  and 
human  sympathy;  and  for  lack  of  these  he 
drooped,  and  seemed  at  last  like  a  bril- 
liant being  chloroformed.  Those  of  us 
who  believe  ourselves  to  be  both  Catholic 
and  Protestant  —  or,  as  Dr.  Muhlenberg 
used  to  phrase  it,  those  who  are  Evan- 
gelical Catholics : —  cannot  but  commiser- 
ate Newman  as  he  finished  his  Roman 
Catholic  career,  when  we  compare  him 
with  the  Newman  who  had  inspired  and 
helped  us  in  his  earlier  Anglican  days.  I 
have    said    that    Newman's    life    was    a 


i82        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

drama,  but  not  a  tragedy;  and  this  I 
think  is  so,  if  one  looks  at  the  benefits 
which  Newman  brought  to  the  piety  of 
individuals,  and  at  his  influence  in  deepen- 
ing the  attachment  of  churchmen  to  their 
Church  throughout  the  Anglican  commun- 
ion. But  if,  on  the  other  hand,  we  have 
regard  to  Newman  as  a  personal  phe- 
nomenon —  to  the  condition  of  the  man 
himself  at  the  close  of  his  career,  as  con- 
trasted with  the  beginning  —  then  we 
feel  that  Newman's  life  was  indeed  trag- 
ical. Take,  for  example,  first  the  Paro- 
chial Sermons  of  the  Anghcan  period;  and 
next,  the  Apologia;  and  lastly,  the  occa- 
sional sermons  which  he  published  during 
his  Roman  Catholic  period.  In  the  first, 
as  previously  remarked,  Jesus  Christ 
stands  out  to  us  somewhat  as  He  does  in 
the  New  Testament  —  a  vivid  Person, 
a  real,  sufficient  revelation  in  human  form 


NEWMAN  ONCE  MORE  183 

of  the  Heavenly  Father.  The  immediate, 
accessible  actuahty  of  Christ,  as  the  New 
Testament  portrays  Him,  is  uppermost 
in  Ne^vman's  mind,  and  he  appHes  it  to 
our  heart  and  mind  and  will  in  a  most 
solemn  and  searching  way.  At  the  next 
stage  of  Newman's  career,  in  the  Apologia, 
Christ  seems  to  have  withdrawn  into  the 
background,  and  He  is  to  a  large  extent 
left  out  of  the  argument.  In  the  third 
stage  the  situation  is  even  worse,  for  in 
the  place  that  Christ  used  to  occupy 
other  figures  have  intruded  —  the  Virgin 
Mary  and  St.  Philip  Neri  and  St.  Brid- 
get, and  such  like.  By  way  of  definite 
instance  I  will  give  that  mentioned  in  the 
striking  autobiography  entitled  "A  Soul's 
Pilgrimage." '  Dr.  Charles  F.  B.  Miel 
narrates  the   disappointment  with  which 


1  "A  Soul's  Pilgrimage,"  by  Charles  F.  B.  Miel,  D.D., 
p.  48.     Jacobs,  Philadelphia,  1899. 


i84        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

he  heard  Newman  preach  at  the  Oratory 
in  London  on  Holy  Thursday.  The  topic 
of  Newman's  sermon  was  the  Eucharist. 
"Every  one  was  prepared  for  a  great  utter- 
ance in  keeping  with  the  day  and  the 
solemn  subject  of  the  discourse.  I,  for 
one,  was  disappointed.  For  the  preacher, 
in  giving  a  description  of  the  circumstances 
connected  with  the  Last  Supper,  chose  to 
portray  it,  not  according  to  the  Gospels, 
but  according  to  the  revelation  of  St. 
Bridget!  In  the  most  serious  manner  the 
form  of  the  table  was  described,  the  place 
which  each  of  the  disciples  occupied,  the 
shape  and  position  of  the  dishes  and  vases, 
etc.,  etc.,  and  all  this  detail  was  told  in 
the  confident  manner  of  one  who  was 
narrating  historic  facts."  To  one  who 
knows  what  Newman's  genius  and  schol- 
arship had  been,  and  how  rare  his  power 
to  enlighten  and  pierce  and  elevate  the 


NEWMAN   ONCE   MORE  185 

human  soul  —  surely  to  such  this  sermon 
in  the  Oratory  presents  the  last  act  of  a 
tragedy. 

Yet  in  the  case  of  persons  who  in  real 
life  have  influenced  us  greatly,  we  do  not 
strike  a  balance  between  their  excellen- 
cies and  their  defects:  we  are  attracted 
or  repelled  by  the  assembled  quaUties  as 
a  living  whole;  and  if,  on  the  whole,  the 
influence  is  good,  then  the  weight  of  the 
entire  personality  is  imparted  to  such 
goodness.  So  with  Newman,  the  final, 
prevailing  impression  that  we  carry  from 
his  life  is,  his  intense  personal  piety  com- 
bined with  genuine  distinction  of  mind 
and  spirit.  These  qualities  enabled  him 
to  exercise  his  extraordinary  influence  in 
our  Anglican  communion,  and  far  beyond. 
They  linger  with  us  still  while  we  sing  his 
hymn,  "Lead,  kindly  Light,"  — that  inti- 
mate revelation  of  an  earnest  soul  which 


i86        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

seems  like  an  echo  of  the  prayer  with 
which  Petrarch  closed  his  'Secretum': 
"May  God  lead  me  safe  and  whole  out  of 
so  many  crooked  ways;  that  I  may  follow 
the  Voice  that  calls  me;  that  I  may  raise 
up  no  cloud  of  dust  before  my  eyes;  and 
with  my  mind  calmed  down  and  at  peace, 
I  may  hear  the  world  grow  still  and  silent, 
and  the  winds  of  adversity  die  away." 

In  order  that  Newman  himself  may 
strike  that  note  for  me,  in  closing  this 
study  of  his  character  I  quote  a  passage 
from  the  "Dream  of  Gerontius,"  a  poem 
so  dear  to  General  Gordon  that  he  carried 
it  with  him  even  at  Khartoum.^  Gor- 
don's was  an  individuality  as  unique  as 
Newman's,  though  in  a  different  way, 
and  quite  as  independent.  Gordon,  like 
Newman  and  St.  Paul,  "died  daily";  and 


1  Wilfred  Ward's  "Biography  of  Newman,"  Vol.  II., 
p.  S^S' 


NEWMAN   ONCE    MORE  187 

Newman's  poem  gave  true  expression  to 
Gordon's  martial  soul.  Now  that  both  of 
them  —  the  soldier  and  the  Cardinal  — 
have  gone  to  their  last  account,  we  can 
link  them  in  this  passage,  where  Geron- 
tius  tells  of  the  feeling  with  which  the 
departing  soul  passes  into  the  presence  of 
his  Judge  and  Saviour: 

Soul. 
"I  go  before  my  Judge.    Ah!  .  .  ." 

Angel. 

"...    Praise  to  His  Name! 
The  eager  spirit  has  started  from  my  hold, 
And,  with  intemperate  energy  of  love, 
Flies  to  the  dear  feet  of  Emmanuel: 
But,  ere  it  reach  them,  the  keen  sanctity, 
With  which  its  effluence,  like  a  glory,  clothes 
And  circles  round  the  Crucified,  has  seized, 
And  scorch'd,  and  shrivell'd  it;  and  now  it 

lies 
Passive  and  still  before  the  awful  Throne. 


i88        ESSAYS  IN  APPRECIATION 

O  happy,  suffering  soul!  for  it  is  safe, 
Consumed,  yet  quicken'd,  by  the  glance  of 
God." 

Soul. 

"Take  me  away,  and  in  the  lowest  deep 

There  let  me  be.  .  .  . 
There  will  I  sing,  and  soothe  my  stricken 
breast. 

Which  ne'er  can  cease 
To  throb,  and  pine,  and  languish,  till  pos- 
sest 

Of  its  Sole  Peace. 
There  will  I  sing  my  absent  Lord  and  Love  — 

Take  me  away, 
That  sooner  I  may  rise,  and  go  above. 
And  see  Him  in  the  truth  of  everlasting  day." 


BISHOP    DOANE— THE    POET 


BISHOP    DOANE— THE    POET 

In  this  issue  the  Churchman  contains  a 
letter  expressive  of  the  sincere  sympathy 
which  all  friends  of  the  Bishop  of  Albany 
are  feeling  at  this  time  —  sympathy  which 
surely  is  shared  by  church  people  generally, 
for  Bishop  Doane  is  known  and  honoured 
throughout  our  country,  and  far  beyond. 
This  is  neither  the  place  nor  the  time  to  say 
more  on  that  intimate  theme;  but  I  think 
that  even  here  and  now  something  can  be 
said  which  will  not  be  out  of  harmony  with 
what  so  many  of  us  are  thinking  in  our 
hearts. 

More  than  a  generation  ago  the  first 
Bishop  Doane,  of  New  Jersey,  in  one  of 
the  valuable  footnotes  to  his  (first)  Ameri- 
can edition  of  Keble's  Christian  Year, 
in  quoting  one  of  Dr.   Croswell's  fugitive 


192       ESSAYS    IN   APPRECIATION 

poems,  said  of  that  notable  Boston  clergy- 
man, "He  has  more  unwritten  poetry  in 
him  than  any  man  I  know."  That  re- 
mark might  well  be  applied  to  the  second 
Bishop  Doane,  and  I  have  so  thought 
of  it  lately.  Standing  before  us,  as  he 
now  does,  in  noble  loneliness,  bereaved  of 
his  last  child,  the  many  friends  of  the 
Bishop  of  Albany  are  thinking  of  him  not 
so  much  as  the  Pastor,  the  Bishop,  the 
statesman,  the  fearless  leader  of  men  — 
in  all  which  characters  he  has  been  distin- 
guished during  his  long  career  —  but  rather 
in  a  more  pathetic  guise,  which  appeals 
directly  to  our  most  human  sympathies; 
and  it  is  in  this  connection  that  Bishop 
Doane's  poetic  gift  has  been  recalled  to  me. 
If  he  had  not  spent  himself  in  countless 
other  ways,  for  the  Church  and  for  the 
world  at  large,  there  can  be  little  doubt 
that  he  would  have  been  widely  recognized 


BISHOP    DOANE  — THE    POET     193 

as  a  true  poet;  whereas  in  the  stress  and 
complexity  of  his  regular  duties  he  has 
been,  for  the  most  part,  obliged  to  live 
"with  all  the  music  in  him  still  unsung." 
Now  and  then,  indeed,  fugitive  verses  from 
his  pen  have  got  before  the  public,  but  they 
were  inadequate  samples  of  his  unwritten 
store;  although  in  his  sermons  and  letters, 
and  above  all  in  his  remarkable  extempore 
addresses,  there  were  abundant  signs  of 
his  poetic  cast  of  mind.  Once  or  twice  he 
has  accomplished  the  difficult  feat  of  com- 
posing a  really  great  hymn,  such  as  "  An- 
cient of  Days,"  which  has  a  permanent 
place,  not  only  in  our  own  Hymnal,  but 
in  collections  of  sacred  song  put  forth  by 
other  Christian  denominations,  both  here 
and  abroad.  I  recollected  this  hymn 
when,  in  a  private  letter,  I  was  told  of  the 
touching  appearance  of  the  aged  Bishop 
as  Celebrant  at  Holy  Communion  in  his 


194      ESSAYS    IN   APPRECIATION 

little  church  at  Northeast  Harbor,  about 
the  time  when  the  funeral  car  was  bearing 
the  remains  of  his  beloved  child  to  her 
distant  grave. 

Since  then  I  have  called  to  mind  another 
poem  of  his,  less  widely  known  —  a  very 
human  document,  bearing  also  character- 
istic marks  of  the  devout  divine.  Bishop 
Doane  has  always  been  as  fond  of 
animals  as  of  mankind;  and  those  who 
are  familiar  with  Dr.  Brown's  "  Rab 
and  his  Friends"  and  Matthew  Arnold's 
"Geist"  will  find  much  of  the  fine 
feeling  and  poetry  of  the  Scotch  physi- 
cian and  the  English  man-of-letters  con- 
densed in  these  beautiful  verses  of  our 
American  Bishop,  along  with  notes  that  are 
quite  his  own.  For  years  I  have  had  these 
verses  on  a  card  that  stands  on  my  study 
mantelpiece,  to  catch  my  eye  in  vacant 
moments.    I  reproduce  them  here  as  a 


BISHOP    DOANE  — THE   POET     195 

fair  example  of  the  wealth  of  "unwritten 
poetry"  that  is,  and  always  has  been,  in 
the  Bishop  of  Albany.  Possibly  in  this 
hour  of  deep  sorrow,  when  his  closest 
friends  can  but  offer  him  the  mute  condo- 
lence of  clasped  hands  and  wistful  eyes, 
he  will  not  refuse  to  accept,  from  one  less 
intimate,  this  earlier  utterance  of  himself 
to  himself,  which  expresses  much  that  he 
has  been  used  to  say  to  others  in  like 
case;  for  here  he  says  all  that  can  be 
said,  and  better  than  others  could  say  it: 

Bishop  Doane  on  his  Dog 

"I  am  quite  sure  he  thinks  that  I  am  God  — 
Since  he  is  God  on  whom  each  one  depends 
For  life,  and  all  things  that  his  bounty  sends  — 
My  dear  old  dog,  most  constant  of  all  friends; 
Not  quick  to  mind,  but  quicker  far  than  I 
To  Him  whom  God  I  know  and  own :  his  eye 
Deep  brown  and  liquid,  watches  for  my  nod; 
He  is  more  patient  underneath  the  rod 
Than  I,  when  God  His  wise  corrections  sends. 
He  looks  love  at  me  deep  as  words  e'er  spake: 
And  from  me  never  crumb  nor  sup  will  take 


196       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

But  he  wags  thanks  with  his  most  vocal  tail: 
And  when  some  crashing  noise  wakes  all  his  fear, 
He  is  content  and  quiet  if  I  am  near, 
Secure  that  my  protection  will  prevail. 
So,  faithful,  mindful,  thankful,  trustful,  he 
Tells  me  what  I  unto  my  God  should  be." 


AN   EXPERIMENT  IN   CONSERVA- 
TIVE  REVISION  OF   THE   NEW 
TESTAMENT 

A   REVIEW 


AN   EXPERIMENT   IN  CONSERVA- 
TIVE  REVISION   OF   THE  NEW 
TESTAMENT  1 

Dean  Beeching,  of  Norwich,  and  Arch- 
deacon Westcott  have  just  pubhshed  a 
tentative  revision  of  the  Authorized  Ver- 
sion of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews;  and 
my  friend  Dean  Beeching,  in  presenting 
me  with  a  copy,  writes  me  that  the  authors 
"would  be  interested  to  know  how  it 
strikes  American  opinion."  I  am  in  hopes 
that  this  review  will  elicit  some  expres- 
sions of  such  opinion,  both  from  Biblical 
scholars  and  from  devout  readers  generally; 
since  it  is  for  the  latter  that  this  version  is 
specially  intended.  The  authors  modestly 
call  themselves  "Two  Clerks." 


^  The  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews :  An  Experiment  in  Con- 
servative Revision.  By  Two  Clerks.  Cambridge  Uni- 
versity Press,  191 2. 


200       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

This  revision  is  a  result  of  the  memorial 
presented  last  year  to  the  Archbishop  of 
Canterbury  by  a  deputation  headed  by 
Bishop  Boyd  Carpenter  and  the  Dean  of 
Norwich.  The  memorial  was  extensively 
signed  by  English  scholars  of  all  denomina- 
tions. It  invited  the  Archbishop  to 
appoint  a  Conamittee  to  correct  the  Author- 
ized Version  of  the  New  Testament  "in 
those  places  where  it  is  erroneous  or  mis- 
leading or  obscure."  Archbishop  David- 
son, in  his  reply,  expressed  a  wish  that  the 
memorialists  should  provide  a  specimen 
to  exhibit  the  kind  of  revision  which  they 
desired,  and  he  suggested  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews  as  the  specimen  to  be  under- 
taken. 

In  the  Note  prefixed  to  their  work  the 
revisers  state  that  "this  revision  of  the 
A.  V.  is  intended  to  be  strictly  conserva- 
tive.   Alterations   are   made   only  where 


CONSERVATIVE    REVISION        201 

mistranslation  or  needless  ambiguity  or 
considerations  of  text  appear  to  call  for 
them.  Further,  as  a  general  principle, 
changes  are  made  most  sparingly  in  the 
most  familiar  passages.  i\t  this  late  hour, 
when  the  revision  of  King  James  has  won 
for  itself  acceptance  with  the  whole  English- 
speaking  race,  we  are  convinced  that  if 
changes  are  to  be  made  in  what  have  be- 
come 'household  words,'  they  must  be 
such  as  would  generally  escape  the  im- 
trained  reader's  notice.  Happily  it  is  the 
best  known  passages  that  least  require 
alteration.  In  regard  to  the  rest  we  have 
not  bound  ourselves  by  any  rule.  Aorists, 
wherever  they  come,  are  treated  on  their 
merits;  and  we  have  allowed  ourselves 
much  hberty  in  the  rendering  of  any  given 
Greek  word.  The  punctuation  has  been 
freely  modified,  and  so  has  the  use  of 
italics.     It  is  only  irritating  to  have  'is' 


202       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

or  'are'  printed  in  italics,  when  they  are 
not  expressed  in  the  Greek,  because  it  is 
not  Greek  usage  so  to  do." 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  the  Churchman 
will  in  due  time  supply  its  readers  with  a 
critique  of  this  work  from  the  standpoint 
of  accurate  Greek  scholarship;  and  then, 
of  course,  the  question  of  the  most  authori- 
tative texts  will  come  up,  though  this 
question  has  evidently  not  been  shirked 
by  the  Two  Clerks.  This  present  review 
is  but  preliminary,  by  way  of  caUing  atten- 
tion to  an  important  publication.  So  far 
as  our  branch  of  the  Church  in  America 
is  concerned,  it  has  for  some  time  been 
apparent  that  our  congregations  do  not 
desire  that  the  R.  V.  should  be  considered 
to  be,  on  the  whole,  more  than  an  experi- 
ment. They  do  not  wish  it  to  be  substi- 
tuted altogether  for  the  A.  V.,  which 
unsurpassed  example  of  style  is  still  felt 


CONSERVATIVE    REVISION        203 

to  be  more  inspiring  in  worship  than  any 
other  for  the  English  race.  Our  General 
Convention  authorized  for  alternative 
use  in  our  churches  an  edition  of  the  A.  V. 
which  embodies  in  the  margin  the  alter- 
native readings  of  the  Westminster  or 
American  editions  of  the  R.  V.,  together 
with  others  adopted  by  our  own  special 
Committee  for  the  Apocrypha.  Subse- 
quently our  General  Convention  extended 
the  permission,  so  that  now  the  English 
or  American  R.  V.  may,  like  the  Margi- 
nal Readings  Bible,  be  used  as  a  substi- 
tute for  the  King  James  Version  in 
reading  the  Lessons  in  church.  Now 
comes  this  new  revision  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews  by  Two  Clerks,  as  part  of  a 
movement  to  provide  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land also  with  an  alternative  to  the  A.  V. 
which  will  be  generally  acceptable  for 
use  in  Church  services.    Hereby  it  appears 


204      ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

that  the  struggle  which  went  on  so  long  in 
England  before  the  King  James  Version  at 
last  prevailed,  is  now  being  repeated. 
And  as  in  Jerome's  day  with  the  Vulgate, 
and  at  the  Reformation  with  the  King 
James  Bible,  so  now,  the  people  generally, 
not  merely  scholars,  must  decide.  Hith- 
erto in  England,  as  among  ourselves,  the 
R.  V.  has  hardly  got  beyond  the  use  of 
scholars.  In  public  parochial  worship  of 
the  Church  of  England  it  has  been  unau- 
thorized and  seldom  read.  Especially  in 
the  New  Testament  the  authors  of  the 
R.  V.  were  too  meticulous,  seeming  to 
be  fond  of  alteration  for  its  own  sake;  as 
when,  for  example,  they  changed  'foreas- 
much  then'  into  'since  then,'  and  'boldly' 
into  'with  boldness.'  These  are  but  two 
of  almost  countless  instances.  Thus  the 
occasional  pedantry,  the  excessive  literal- 
ness,    the    halting    diction,    the    frequent 


CONSERVATIVE   REVISION        205 

failure  to  perceive  the  difference  between 
a  commentary  and  a  vivid,  vital  rendering 
in  another  tongue  "  understanded  of  the 
people"  —  these  qualities,  over  and  above 
the  novelty  of  the  R.  V.,  have  stood  in  the 
way  of  its  general  acceptance,  in  spite  of 
its  many  improvements  and  indispensable 
corrections  of  wrong  translation.  Ordi- 
nary readers  and  hearers  missed  the  rhythm 
and  the  style  of  the  familiar  A.  V.,  while 
the  obvious  faults  of  the  R.  V.  prevented 
such  readers  and  hearers  from  recogniz- 
ing their  debt  of  gratitude  to  modern 
scholarship.  Nevertheless  discriminating 
readers,  among  the  laity  as  well  as  the 
clergy,  have  become  more  and  more  im- 
patient of  the  inaccuracies  and  obscurities 
of  the  King  James  Bible.  It  is  felt  that 
we  owe  it  to  our  own  sense  of  reverence 
for  Holy  Scripture  that  the  original 
meaning  should  be  conveyed  to  us  in  a 


2o6       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

form  that    is  more  entirely  worthy  and 
intelligible. 

The  authors  of  this  new  version  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  are  accomplished 
scholars,  and  Dean  Beeching's  other  publi- 
cations have  already  manifested  a  fine 
feeling  for  rhythm  and  the  best  English 
style.  Whether  the  Two  Clerks,  in  their 
sample  of  what  might  be  done  with  the 
whole  New  Testament  for  congregational 
use,  have  accomplished  the  extremely  dif- 
ficult feat  of  safeguarding  the  indispensable 
good  points  of  the  R.  V.  while  preserv- 
ing the  music  and  the  majesty  of  the  A.  V., 
they  now  leave  to  be  decided  by  the 
Christian  public  at  large.  Devout  and 
educated  worshippers  should  make  a  care- 
ful and  sympathetic  comparison,  and  give 
this  work  a  fair  trial.  Undoubtedly  the 
Two  Clerks  have  properly  swept  away  a 
large  part  of   the  vexatious  trifles  of  the 


CONSERVATIVE    REVISION        207 

R.  V.  which  I  have  above  referred  to;  yet  I 
confess  that  I  do  not  think  they  have  quite 
escaped  the  same  fault.  For  example, 
what  is  the  vital  difference  between  'by 
whom'  and  'through  whom'?  or  between 
'being  made'  and  'having  become'?  or 
between  'have  by  inheritance  obtained' 
and  'have  inherited'?  Yet  for  myself,  I 
am  disposed  to  say  that  if  I  had  to  choose 
between  this  and  the  King  James  and  the 
Revised  Version  for  use  at  present  in  our 
public  services,  I  should  on  the  whole 
prefer  this  "Revision  by  Two  Clerks"; 
for  here  the  changes  which  accurate 
scholarship  requires  are  more  generally 
not  worded  so  as  to  irritate  the  ordinary 
reader,  who  will  often,  however,  be  thank- 
ful that  he  can  now  understand  passages 
which  hitherto  were  obscure  to  him.  The 
slight  changes  in  punctuation  and  the 
occasional  use  of  brackets  are  very  helpful; 


2o8       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

the  marginal  notes  and  footnotes  are 
illuminating;  and  between  the  lines  of  the 
brief  appendices  scholars  will  discern  ac- 
complished learning  and  patient  endeavor 
to  weigh  every  side  of  complicated  ques- 
tions, although,  for  the  sake  of  conserva- 
tism and  popular  acceptance,  the  A.  V. 
has  been  allowed  to  stand  except  in  flagrant 
instances.  Notice  in  the  Appendix  the 
terse  discussion  as  to  the  relative  merits 
of  the  words  Covenant  and  Testament  in 
the  difficult  passage,  Hebrews  ix.  15  ff.; 
and  in  reference  to  ii.  5,  the  significant 
substitution  of  the  words  'which  is  our 
theme'  for  'whereof  we  speak';  and  the 
suggestion  that  the  phrase  'world  to 
come'  may  mean  'the  not  yet  created 
world'  (the  world  in  which  man  is  living 
here  and  now),  i.e.  'the  New  Age  initiated 
by  Christ,'  as  suggested  in  the  margin  of 
vi.  s. 


CONSERVATIVE    REVISION        209 

As  examples  of  the  version  proper, 
notice  the  bright  Hght  which  is  thrown  on 
the  uncertain  passage,  ii.  9,  by  the  simple 
transposition  of  a  comma,  together  with 
the  substitution  of  the  words  'because  of 
for  the  words  'for  the.'  In  iii.  i,  how  ad- 
mirable is  the  change  of  the  words  'High 
Priest  of  our  profession '  into  '  High  Priest 
whom  we  profess.'  How  satisfying  is  the 
exchange  of  'that  speaketh  better  than 
that  of  Abel'  for  'more  eloquent  than 
Abel.'  Throughout  chapter  vi  are  numerous 
instances  of  slight  but  subtle  alterations, 
now  of  a  word  and  now  of  punctuation, 
which  enhance  the  translation  without 
spoiling  the  diction.  Some  of  the  emenda- 
tions, as  in  ix.  11,  are  supported  by  the 
R.  V. ;  while  in  xi.  13  the  Two  Clerks  have, 
I  think,  improved  on  the  improvement  of 
the  R.  v.;  and  in  xi.  17,  the  alteration  of 
'offered'  to  'was  ready  to  offer'  is  notable, 


2IO       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

and  certainly  agrees  with  the  Old  Testa- 
ment story  which  the  author  of  this  Epistle 
is  referring  to.  But  in  xii.  5, 1  cannot  but 
think  that  the  whole  argument  shows  that 
the  translation  of  the  R.  V.  is  right,  while 
that  of  the  Two  Clerks  is  wrong.  Perhaps 
no  better  example  of  the  success  of  the 
Two  Clerks,  as  compared  with  the  R.  V., 
can  be  foimd  than  in  the  respective  ver- 
sions of  xi.  I,  which  I  put  side  by  side. 

Revised  Version  Two  Clerks 

Now  faith  is  the  assurance  Now  faith  is  the  substance 

of    things    hoped  for,    the  of    things   hoped   for,    the 

proving  of  things  not  seen,  proving  of  things  not  seen. 

For  therein  the  elders  had  It    was    by   it    the    elders 

witness  borne  to  them.    By  obtained   a     good     report, 

faith,  etc.  Through  faith,  etc. 

I  have  chosen  this  particular  verse  because 
it  enables  me  to  call  attention  to  an  evident 
slip;  for  Dean  Beeching  writes  me  that 
'It  was  by  it'  should  read  'By  it.'  For 
purposes  of  comparison  I  select  one  more 


CONSERVATIVE    REVISION        211 

passage,  ii.  16,  where  the  Authorized 
Version  reads:  'For  verily  he  took  not  on 
him  the  nature  of  angels;  but  he  took  on 
him  the  seed  of  Abraham.' 

Revised  Version  Two  Clerks 

For  verily  not  of  angels  For  verily  he  taketh  not 

doth  he  take  hold,  but  he  angels  for  his,   but  he 

taketh  hold  of  the  seed  of  taketh  the  seed  of  Abra- 

Abraham.  ham. 

Here  the  R.  V.  renders  the  original  more  ex- 
actly than  either  the  Two  Clerks  or  theA.V. 
Few  words  have  been  more  disputed  by 
commentators  than  imXaix/BdveTaL  here. 
But  when  all  is  said,  can  we  do  better 
than  to  borrow  from  Bishop  Andrewes 
(Sermons,  Vol.  I,  pp.  1-12)?  "He  taketh 
not  the  Angels' ;  but  the  seed  of  Abraham 
he  taketh."  Side  by  side  with  which 
Andrewes  puts  the  Vulgate:  "Nunquam 
enim  Angelas  apprehendit,  sed  semen 
Abrahae  apprehendit" ;  and  gives  the  gloss: 
"laying  fast  hold,  and  seizing  surely  on 


212       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

him.  So  two  things  it  suppose th:  i.  a 
flight  of  the  one,  and  2.  a  hot  pursuit  of 
the  other."  And  another  commentator 
interprets  it:  "He  doth  not  lay  hold  of 
Angels,  etc.,  i.e.  to  Hft  them  up."  But  I 
am  digressing. 

By  following  the  R.  V.  in  the  substitu- 
tion of  the  word  'erring'  for  'gone  out  of 
the  way,'  the  thorough  English  of  the  A. 
V.  is  lost,  and  I  miss  the  familiar  allusion 
to  pathetic  passages  in  the  Psalms  and  the 
Prophets.  And  I  sometimes  regret  that 
the  Two  Clerks  did  not  boldly  introduce 
in  the  text  of  their  version  emendations 
which  they  have  relegated  to  the  margin. 
For  example,  in  v.  7,  'save  him  from 
death'  might  well  be  'release  him  from 
death' ;  in  v.  10,  'called  of  God'  might  well 
be  'hailed  of  God';  in  vi.  i  'principles  of 
the  doctrine  of  Christ'  might  well  be 
'rudiments^;  or  why   not    have   it   'first 


CONSERVATIVE   REVISION        213 

principles,'  as  the  R.  V.  does,  and  as,  in 
V.  12,  both  the  R.  V.  and  the  A.  V.  agree 
in  doing?  Surely  this  would  make  the  in- 
tention of  the  original  clearer  to  ordinary 
readers.  For  the  same  reason,  in  the 
translation  'leaving  the  principles  of  the 
doctrine  of  Christ,'  I  wish  that  the  Two 
Clerks  had  adopted  the  R.  V.,  'cease  to 
speak  of  the  principles,'  etc.;  for  the 
original  justifies  this,  and  who  wants  any 
Christian,  adult  though  he  be,  to  leave  the 
first  principles  of  Christ's  doctrine?  though 
a  teacher  may  well,  for  the  moment,  cease 
to  speak  of  them,  and  go  on. 

So  far  I  have  given  instances  of  the 
minute  criticism  and  comparison  to  which 
this  valuable  work  must  necessarily  be 
subjected,  after  the  three  versions  before 
us  have  first  been  read  through  as  a  whole, 
if  possible  aloud.  It  may  be  noticed  that 
on  page  19,  in  the  footnote  to  chapter  vii. 


214       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

27,  the  Two  Clerks'  comment  is  so  con- 
densed as  not  to  be  quite  clear;  and  on 
page  10,  in  the  margin  of  ii.  16,  the  word 
not  appears  to  be  lacking;  and  on  page  13, 
in  the  margin  of  verse  7,  'appoint'  should 
evidently  read  'appointeth.' 

I  sincerely  regret  that  the  Two  Clerks 
have  not  divided  the  Epistle  into  para- 
graphs as  well  as  into  verses.  In  the  R. 
V.  the  paragraphs  are  boldly  indicated. 
Doubtless  the  verses  have  become  so  in- 
wrought into  our  habits  of  recollection  and 
devotion  that  earnest  Christians  would 
deplore  any  edition  of  the  Bible  for  pop- 
ular use  which  did  not  indicate  the 
verses  as  sharply  as  is  done  in  this  version 
of  the  Two  Clerks,  and  also  in  the  A.  V.; 
yet  I  cannot  but  feel  that  the  paragraphs 
should  also  be  given,  as  in  the  R.  V. 
Nor  do  I  see  why  both  ends  might  not 
be   accomplished  by  printing  the  verses 


CONSERVATIVE   REVISION         215 

as  the  A.  V.  and  the  Two  Clerks  print 
them,  while  at  the  same  time  indicating 
the  paragraphs  by  clear  division,  leaving 
a  blank  line  between  them.  Just  as  the 
chapters  often  obscure  the  connection  of 
the  thought,  so  also  throughout  the  Bible, 
and  above  all  in  the  New  Testament, 
it  is  dijficult  —  even  for  an  attentive 
scholar,  and  much  more  for  an  ordinary 
reader  —  to  grasp  the  sequence  of  the 
thought  without  the  assistance  of  proper 
paragraphs. 

Exigencies  of  space  forbid  my  going 
through  the  whole  Epistle  so  as  to  exhibit 
the  loving  thoroughness  of  touch  and 
insight  which  the  Two  Clerks  manifest 
throughout.  Although  their  work  has  of 
necessity  been  largely  negative,  there  is 
positive  proof  in  it  that  a  "conservative 
revision"  of  the  Authorized  Version  is  not 
only  desirable  but  practicable;   nor  have 


2i6       ESSAYS    IN   APPRECIATION 

the  Two  Clerks  magnified  their  office  in 
the  objectionable  way  that  many  of  the 
first  supporters  of  the  Revised  Version 
did.  Thus  on  the  whole  I  think  that  the 
object  of  these  present  revisers  is  attained : 
that,  if  the  whole  New  Testament  could  be 
so  handled,  the  Church  of  England  would 
have  arrived  at  a  Via  Media  between  the 
A.  V.  and  the  R.  V.  which  would  be 
generally  acceptable  to  the  English-speak- 
ing world,  bringing  the  people  closer  than 
hitherto  to  the  mind  of  the  original,  which 
we  venerate  as  God's  Word. 


"GENERAL"  BOOTH 


"GENERAL"   BOOTH 

He  was  called  "General"  for  short. 
His  original  and  proper  title  was  "Gen- 
eral Superintendent  of  the  Salvation 
Army,"  but  his  simple  associates  could 
not  away  with  a  title  in  so  many  words, 
so  they  called  him  "General,"  and  let  it 
go  at  that.  And  this  true  history  of  the 
name  he  bore  is  typical  of  his  whole 
career:    it  was  a  natural  evolution. 

The  secular  newspapers  have  given 
amply  the  details  of  his  life,''_so  it  is  need- 
less to  repeat  them  here;  but  a  repre- 
sentative Church  newspaper  would  be 
unworthy  of  itself  if  it  allowed  his  death 
to  pass  unnoticed.  Many  of  the  methods 
and  much  of  the  manners  of  General 
Booth  were  not  ours;  but  he  had  a  great 
deal  to  teach  our  Church,  and  some  of  it 


220       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

has  evidently  been  learned,  both  by  our 
clergymen  and  our  laymen.  Through  evil 
report  and  good  report,  and  in  spite  of 
much  physical  disability,  he  slowly  came 
into  his  own.  To  one  who  is  aware  of 
his  beginnings  and  life-long  limitations, 
it  seems  almost  grotesque  that  staid, 
conservative  Oxford  —  so  jealous  of  her 
learning,  so  hearty  in  her  abhorrence  of 
"the  Philistines"  —  should  have  conferred 
on  this  man  her  degree  of  Doctor  of  Civil 
Law;  but  Oxford  did  it,  and  Booth  de- 
served it.  For  into  the  very  heart  of 
Oxford,  and  of  all  decent  England,  Booth 
had  driven  his  own  conviction  that  the 
most  venerable  of  human  laws  are  but  a 
dead  letter,  unless  and  until  they  are 
suffused  and  applied  by  the  higher  law  of 
love.  AU  over  the  world  there  are  thou- 
sands of  well-to-do  people  who  owe  it 
to  General  Booth,  and  his  blatant,  con- 


"GENERAL"    BOOTH  221 

spicuous  reminders,  that  they  did  not 
quite  forget  "Who  is  my  Neighbor." 
All  over  the  world  there  are  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  unfortunates  who  owe  it 
to  Booth,  and  his  strange,  penetrating 
ways,  that  the  reality  of  the  Christ  hfe 
was  brought  home  to  their  faith.  And 
anyone  who  has  studied  Professor  William 
James's  "Varieties  of  Religious  Experi- 
ence," knows  that  General  Booth,  for  all 
the  extravagance  of  his  expressions  and 
the  uncouthness  of  his  ways,  stood  upon 
a  by  no  means  contemptible  part  of  the 
bed-rock  of  human  experience.  And  if 
he  was  to  obey  his  Master,  going  into  the 
highways  and  hedges  to  compel  men  to 
come  in:  if  his  message  was  to  reach  and 
seize  outrageous  people  of  the  slums  — 
not  here  and  there  a  few,  but  thousands 
of  them  —  who  shall  say  that  General 
Booth's  methods  were  not  necessary,  at 


222       ESSAYS    IN    APPRECIATION 

any  rate  if  Booth,  and  not  another,  was 
to  do  the  desperate  business?  And  who 
but  Booth  did  do  it,  or  could  have  done  it 
as  he  did? 

He  was  a  religious  enthusiast,  and  the 
mystery  was,  that  he  was  so  marvellously 
practical.  His  long,  hooked  nose  and 
Semitic  head  indicated  his  indomitable 
will,  and  should  have  prepared  us  for  the 
singular  combination  in  him  of  intrepid 
idealism  with  courage  to  face  the  facts. 
Far  on  in  his  career,  looking  backward, 
he  declared  in  a  moment  of  expansion,  "I 
hungered  for  hell.  I  pushed  into  the  midst 
of  it."  His  way  of  getting  there  was  orig- 
inal, unconventional  to  the  point  of  re- 
pulsiveness  to  average  Anglicans,  and  to 
average  Nonconformists  and  Romanists 
as  well;  although  Father  Dolling  under- 
stood him  without  protest;  and  who  shall 
say  that  John  Wesley,  and  David  Liv- 


"GENERAL"    BOOTH  223 

ingston,  and  Vincent  de  Paul,  and  the 
great  mediaeval  and  primitive  mission- 
aries —  even  Paul  the  Apostle  himself  — 
would  not  have  understood  and  approved 
William  Booth  when  he  made  one  motto 
out  of  these  two:  "The  world  for  Christ," 
and  ' '  Soup,  Soup  and  Salvation ' '  ?  Grant- 
ing that  he  was  a  pioneer  in  advertising 
and  in  courting  publicity,  can  we  imagine, 
in  the  face  of  the  results,  that  our  Saviour 
would  not  have  said  of  Booth  what  He 
said  of  others  who  troubled  His  more  reg- 
ular disciples:  "He  that  is  not  against 
us  is  for  us"?  True,  even  among  Booth's 
most  considerate  critics  there  are  many 
who,  while  rejoicing  in  his  wonderful  suc- 
cesses and  admitting  his  genius,  not  merely 
for  organizing  men  and  women,  but  for 
getting  men  and  women  to  organize  them- 
selves —  even  many  such  are  doubtful 
whether  his  results  were  always  econom- 


224       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

ically  sound  or  religiously  quite  sane. 
They  admit  his  keen  grasp  of  some  of  our 
most  difficult  social  problems;  but  they 
are  not  yet  sure  that  he  solved  these  prob- 
lems, and  they  fear  that  no  successor  can 
be  found  to  finish  what  Booth  began,  and 
determine  its  final  character.  Yet  what 
great  organizer  or  philanthropist  ever 
escaped  just  criticism  in  details?  On  the 
whole,  the  general  verdict  of  inteUigent 
mankind  is  well  expressed  in  the  letters 
to  his  family  by  President  Taft  and  the 
King  of  England:  "Only  in  the  future 
shall  we  realize  the  good  wrought  by  him 
for  his  fellow-creatures." 

In  one  respect  the  course  of  the  Salva- 
tion Army  illustrates  a  tendency  of  relig- 
ious organizations  everywhere  in  our  day. 
General  Booth  began  as  a  Christian 
revivalist:  the  keynote  of  his  message  was 
personal  religion;    but  ere  long  his  most 


"GENERAL"    BOOTH  225 

notable  endeavours  were  along  the  lines 
of  sociology  and  of  experiments  in  social 
service,  with  rehgion  in  the  background. 
Even  at  the  outset  of  the  Christian  dis- 
pensation this  problem  came  to  the  surface 
with  the  Twelve  Apostles;  and  the  New 
Testament  indicates  how  they  tried  to 
meet  it  by  instituting  the  Seven  Deacons. 
But  the  problem  still  awaits  a  satisfactory 
solution,  as  our  "Institutional  Churches" 
testify.  In  all  our  Churches  there  are 
many  who  think  that  hereby  the  ministers 
of  religion  proper  are  undertaking  to  do 
directly  what,  so  far  as  they  are  con- 
cerned, should  be  done  indirectly:  that 
the  minister  of  Christ  should  follow  more 
closely  in  the  steps  of  Christ  himself:  that 
our  ministers  should  inspire  the  motives 
for  social  service,  rather  than  attempt  to 
conduct  it  in  detail.  Perhaps  subsequent 
developments  of  the  Salvation  Army,  now 


226       ESSAYS   IN   APPRECIATION 

that  General  Booth  himself  is  gone,  will 
help  us  all  to  a  wise  determination  of  this 
serious  and  complicated  question. 

When  all  has  been  said,  how  noticeably- 
General  Booth's  life  exemplified  the  truth 
that  extremes  meet!  William  Booth  in 
his  autocracy  was  intellectually  at  one 
with  Rome  in  her  autocracy.  He  did  not 
want  to  bother  others,  or  to  be  himself 
bothered,  with  questions  of  the  intellect. 
Someone  asked  how  he  squared  the  idea 
of  eternal  punishment  with  his  belief  in 
God's  eternal  love.  "What's  the  use," 
he  answered  impatiently,  striking  his 
hand  upon  the  table,  "what's  the  use  of 
wanting  to  explain  things,  and  worrying 
about  interpretations?  That's  how  work 
is  stopped."  He  believed  in  educating 
the  outcast,  but  he  would  not  see  that 
when  you  educate  a  human  soul  you  com- 
pel it  to  ask  questions;    and  that  out  of 


"GENERAL"    BOOTH  227 

questions  has  come  the  spiritual  stimulus 
which  advanced  the  world:  that  even 
Christ  declared  that  we  must  love  God 
with  all  our  mind,  and  even  He  confronted 
His  disciples  with  a  penetrating  question: 
"What  think  ye  of  Christ?  Whose  Son 
is  He?  Whom  say  ye  that  I,  the  Son  of 
Man,  am?" 

One  of  his  latest  inventions  was  the 
"Suicide  Bureau,"  and  it  widens  our 
view  of  him  when  we  notice  how  he  here 
combined  some  of  the  methods  of  the  con- 
fessional and  the  experience  meeting  with 
those  of  the  Charity  Organization  Society. 
Here  the  wretches  who  were  contem- 
plating suicide  were  induced  to  open  their 
hearts  and  explain  confidentially  their  mis- 
ery to  the  captain  of  the  bureau;  and  we  are 
told  that  many  men  and  women  are  now 
living  steadily  in  self-respect  and  self-sup- 
port, who  owe  their  rescue  to  this  means. 


228       ESSAYS    IN   APPRECIATION 

And  our  appreciation  of  him  is  not 
only  widened  but  deepened  when  we  read 
of  his  scheme  of  clubs  for  lonely  people. 
"Loneliness  —  did  you  ever  think,"  he 
said,  "how  much  sorrow  and  wrong 
come  from  it?  In  the  great  cities  there 
are  thousands  of  lonely  persons;  not  the 
poor,  but  those  who  have  no  friends  or 
family,  no  place  to  go  to  where  any  friendly 
spirit  may  be  f  oimd.  I  want  to  give  them 
a  place  to  go  to  where  they  may  find  some 
congenial  work  to  do,  if  they  so  desire." 

Finally,  how  significantly  human  is 
the  fact  that  at  the  outset,  when  Booth 
was  hesitating  to  take  the  great  leap  in 
the  dark,  it  was  his  wife  who  gave  him 
confidence  to  persevere. 


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